Posted by Adam T. Sutton in Internet Marketing Strategy	September 6, 2007

Which search engine to focus on in Europe, how to quickly SEO video, and what kinds of links you should be attracting

By Adam T. Sutton, Managing Editor, Mequoda Group, LLC

Today's posting is a mass of SEO related news that will help you optimize video, go international and target the right links. Let's get right to it so you can boost your rankings and capture more website traffic.

Boost Video Rankings Faster and Cheaper

First, we'd like to introduce TubeMogul, a free service that uploads video to YouTube, Google Video, Metacafe, Yahoo!, MySpace, AOL Video and others all at once.

TubeMogul also features metrics, comment tracking and the ability to add tags and metadata to the video you upload, according to its site.

This free service is a must-try for any publisher that shares video online. It could cut loads of time off your uploading and tracking by bringing them to one location.

The ability to add tags and metadata also lets you SEO video, which is great, since it's being disseminated to so many websites and spidered by Google. Your rankings should also be helped by TubeMogul's wide dispersal.

If done correctly, videos can drive traffic to your website and TubeMogul could help. Here's how to do it:

1) Create the video
2) Add a short graphic of your URL
3) Give the video good tags and metadata
4) Upload it to as many free video sharing sites as possible
5) Monitor the results

TubeMogul should bring steps four and five to one location, making them less time consuming. And if you need a good example of an affordable and quality video, read this post.

Google's Huge in Europe

Whenever search engines come up, Google's name is invariably mentioned. This report from Axandra's Search Engine Facts newsletter helps justify that phenomenon.

Google's dominance of the U.S. search market is common knowledge, but did you know that Google is virtually unchallenged in Germany, France and the United Kingdom?

The numbers are astounding. In recent months, Google had the following market shares:

•Germany: 88.5 percent
•France: 89.7 percent
•UK: 79.38 percent

Google's closest competitor in all three countries is Yahoo! with the following market shares:

•Germany: 3.4 percent
•France: 3.14 percent
•UK: 7.72 percent

Google's vice grip on the search market both here and abroad will not loosen any time soon. If you're looking to reach out to foreign markets then you'd be wise to accept Google's Webmaster Guidelines as law.

Good Links vs. Bad Links

If you're going to appease the Google Gods then you have to know what makes them happy.

This report by Axandra describes inbound links as "one of the most important factors that Google uses to determine the position of a website in the search results." That means you need as many natural inbound links as possible to boost your search results.

The report defines natural links as "links that webmasters would also build if search engines didn't exist...If a link is logical and on-topic then search engines will like the links."

The report also explains what "unnatural linking patterns" are and why they hurt your search engine rankings.

According to the report, unnatural links are:

•Links from totally unrelated websites
•Links from blog comment spam and forum spam
•Links that exploit a weakness in server design

"If you have a lot of links from unrelated webpages then your website becomes less relevant to the original topic of your site," according to the report. The less relevant search engines deem your website, the lower its rankings will be.

The moral of the story is very familiar: don't cheat. Link farming may work for a little while (like before forums had no-follow codes) but it is only going to hurt you in the long run.

Resource for Journalists, SEOed Exposure for Experts

While we're on the topic of SEO, we thought we'd share a resource called ExpertClick.com. ExpertClick.com is the Yearbook of Experts website that PRWeek called "a dating service of PR." Journalists can register free to get the printed Yearbook of Experts and a news release wire feed at ExpertClick.com. Experts can register to send search-optimized news releases to LexisNexis and Google News as well as a press-room profile page. If you're interested you can save $100 from this link.