HTML 5, Online Viewing Trends, Guest Blogging and the Twitter document leak – SEO Recap part 2

Last Friday, after a very busy week here at the BCA offices, the team finished the last of the emails saved the spreadsheets one last time, and cracked a few beers to sit around the virtual board room table (we are still missing a wall after our office relocation). This following post outlines the 2nd part of the best of our weekly sharing session. Topics covered include HTML 5, Online Viewing Trends, Guest Blogging and the Twitter document leak.

Photo by tlindenbaum via Creative Commons

IE8 Implementing Some HTML 5 Features

Microsoft IE8 will incorporate 4 features from the HTML 5 draft. This adoption is supposed to help the browser better deal with Web 2.0 apps.
The first Beta is using the following pieces of the HTML 5 draft specification:
• cross-document messaging
• a client-side storage API
• network connection awareness
• window location hash so apps can be accessed via back/forward.
The relevant part of this news to SEO is that the window location hash will make Web 2.0 applications more accessible from a user perspective – navigation becomes easier. IE8 will also support CSS 2.1 thanks to its new layout engine as well as some new productivity tools for its users. This makes Microsoft IE, Firefox and Safari all adopters of HTML 5.

Online Viewing Trends

Metacafe recently commissioned a study to find out who in America is watching online video, how much and what kinds. Some of the major facts and statistics that I thought were interesting are listed below:

• 77% of U.S. Internet users are watching online video and 43% viewing something online weekly.
• 37% of users who watched video of a professional quality online (TV clips, movie trailers, sports highlights, music videos, short films, etc) found them as or more enjoyable than watching full length stuff on TV.
• 41% found them to be ‘somewhat’ as entertaining.
• The research was done in survey form and polled 1,927 people from age 12-64 this past April.
• The strongest demographic was males 18-24 where 70% said they watched something weekly.
• A full third of all respondents age 55-64 watched weekly online video.
• Over one-third (34%) watch TV and surf the web simultaneously more than half the time.
• 20% saying that they watch less TV because of online video.
• In regards to online video and ads, people have shown more accepting (52%) in online video than in TV shows.
• On the negative side 20% said they didn’t like it (online video ads) and 28% weren’t sure.

This research poses some interesting questions, like will Youtube look to boost the length of videos that generally appear on their site or are they happy to stay in the realm of shorter duration videos? As more information is being locked away in video file, it is becoming ever important for the search engines to figure a way to assess the quality and content of a video file. A bad video can ruin a good page and a good video can dramatically improve a poor quality page, so what are search engines doing to figure out the difference?

How to Steal Readers and Traffic through Guest Blogging

In this post Lisa Barone discusses how to increase exposure for your site by taking advantage of guest blogging. Here a key list of points to maximise the effectiveness of any guest blog post that you author
• Clean your own house first – sharpen the appearance of your blog.
• Use your best stuff – Don’t hold back on ideas or content.
• Hit the sweet spot – pick something related to you both but your better at it.
• Include relevant links back to your site – Don’t spam but include 1 or 2 relevant links back to your own site.
• Maximise your author information – Make sure you fill in all your details but create a call to action with your link. For example create a link to your RSS feed or email signup.
• Respond to every comment
Guest blogging is a great way of syndicating your content and getting links back to your own blog. [Anyone wanna borrow this awesome recap post? Go on, ya know you wanna! Special for you I give you good price – Kate] Therefore syndication is a pretty important activity in terms of search engine optimisation. If you can do this well, you can start to build up a broad following throughout the industry you are targeting as opposed to a narrow following on just your own blog.

Twitter Document Leak/hack

The first time I heard of this incident was from a blog post on TechCrunch. Apparently some hacker had got into Twitter’s servers and downloaded a fair amount of confidential information. Listed below are some of the documents that the hacker managed to download:
• employment agreements
• calendars of the founders
• new employee interview schedules
• phone logs and bills
• alarm settings
• financial forecast
• a pitch for a Twitter TV show
• confidentiality agreements with companies such as :AOL, Dell, Ericsson and Nokia
• a list of employee dietary restrictions
• credit card numbers
• PayPal and Gmail screen shots
Guess this is a good lesson for those big companies who have confidential documents on their servers, don’t behave like Twitter and leave your server password as “password”.

See Bruce's author page for links to connect on social media.