Building Mailing Lists, List Building, Social Media, Niche Marketing

We all see video ads wherever we go online. But they are not just for the big boys. Small business owners can run videos ads on popular web sites too, and for a lot less than you might think. Dave Kaminski of WebVideoUniversity share’s how in this video

Go to Jivox.com now

About the Author

Dave Kaminski is a professional copywriter, videographer and 10-year veteran of direct response marketing whose work in multimedia advertising has resulted in millions of dollars worth of sales. A former U.S. Marine, Dave specializes in teaching entrepreneurs how to effectively use web video in their marketing efforts.

Dave also offers highly recommended online coaching classes on how to create web video, as well as promote and market them, for both MAC & PC users. For more information on creating web videos, please go here

|   Subscribe to Building Mailing Lists

Google Talks About Getting Your Breadcrumbs In

Last summer it was discovered that Google was testing breadcrumbs in search results (breadcrumbs being the hierarchical display commonly used in site navigation. For example: Home Page>Product Page>Product A Page). Then in mid-November, Google announced that it was rolling out the use of breadcrumbs in search results on a global basis. What this means for webmasters is that if you can get your breadcrumbs into Google’s results, you essentially have more links on the results page. You have a separate link for each page in the breadcrumb trail.

Do your site’s breadcrumbs show up in Google’s results? Leave a comment at WebProNews.

The company said they would only be used in place of some URLs, mainly ones that don’t give the added context of a link the way that breadcrumbs do. Interestingly, there seems to be an incentive for those who go the breadcrumb route because of the multiple links that you just don’t get with regular search results.

Google’s move was generally well received. This was reflected in the comments from WebProNews readers on our past coverage. For example, a commenter going by the handle Stupidscript said, “It’s definitely a good time to start wrapping your head around the notion of ‘providing context’, because the web is heading into its “semantic” period … where each link will be more or less valuable based on its relationships with and context to information found behind other links.”

Google’s use of breadcrumbs in search results is the focus of a recently submitted question to the Google Webmaster Central team. The question was, “Google is showing breadcrumb URLs in SERPs now. Does the kind of delimiter matter? Is there any best practice? What character to use is best? > or | or / or???” Google’s Matt Cutts responded:

Matt says you should have a set of delimited links on your site that accurately reflect your site’s hierarchy. He also notes, however, that it is still in the “early days” for breadcrumbs.

“Think about the situation with sitelinks,” he says. “Whenever we started out with sitelinks, it took a while before…for example, we added the ability in Google Webmaster Tools where you could remove a sitelink that you didn’t like or that you thought was bad. So we started out, and we did a lot of experiments, and we’ve changed the way that sitelinks look several times. And we have different types of sitelinks (within a page, and the standard ones you’re familiar with). So we’ve iterated over time.”

In this same way, he says, Google is in the early stage with breadcrumbs and he has seen different experiments with them. For example, there have been prototypes where the breadcrumbs were in the rich snippet gray line, above the regular snippet. “Having it in the URL is kind of nice, but it could still change over time,” he says.

He says the best advice he can give is to make sure you have a set of delimited links that accurately reflect your site’s hierarchy, and that will give you the best chance of getting breadcrumbs to show up in Google, but Google will continue to work on ways to improve breadcrumbs. He says any new announcements about it will likely be made on the Google Webmaster blog.

While Matt doesn’t exactly lean toward one way or another with regards to which character to use as asked about in the submitted question, all of the examples I have seen highlighted show the “>” used. That includes examples from Google’s original announcement on the inclusion of breadcrumbs (if you see other ways, please point them out in the comments). Based on that, if I were going to choose one, I’d go with that.

There are three types of breadcrumbs (as described here): path, location, and attribute. Path breadcrumbs show the path that the user has taken to arrive at a page, while location breadcrumbs show where the page is located in the website hierarchy. Attribute breadcrumbs give information that categorizes the current page. Obviously, location breadcrumbs would be the ones Google is using (although with personalized search becoming more of a factor, who knows in the future?).

About the author:
Chris Crum has been a part of the WebProNews team and the iEntry Network of B2B Publications since 2003. Follow WebProNews on Facebook or Twitter. Twitter: @CCrum237

|   Subscribe to Building Mailing Lists

This week both YouTube and Vimeo announced beta testing for HTML 5 video. But what exactly is HTML 5 video and what does it mean to you? Here’s a breakdown on what you need to know.

First, the overwhelming majority of video you see on the Internet is Flash. And to place Flash video on a web site for people to view, you need a few things. You need the video itself in a Flash format, you need a player for the video (the thing with the play button), which is also a Flash file. You need embed code which makes the video and player work together on a web page and the viewer needs the Flash plugin installed on their browser.

It can get pretty confusing for people trying to place videos on their web site (at least at first).

HTML 5 is the latest HTML standard for the web… and it aims to make video on the web much simpler for people. Instead of all the stuff I listed above, you just need your video file. Then you can place the video in your web page using a <video> tag… just as easily as you place images on a web page.

Sounds great, right? Well, not exactly. At least not yet.

First, HTML 5 is only supported in the latest and greatest versions of web browsers (and Internet Explorer still doesn’t offer full support). That means instead of downloading a plugin to watch video, viewers would have to download the latest version of their browser.

And second, HTML 5 has sparked a bit of a video war…as to what video format should become the web standard in HTML 5. Firefox decided to support a video format called Ogg Theora. That means to take advantage of the easy-to-add-video features of HTML 5, your video must be encoded in the Ogg Theora format and any existing Flash videos must be re-encoded to the Ogg Theora format (again, this is if your viewers are using Firefox).

Other browsers are somewhat more liberal, or not…Google Chrome supports Ogg Theora and H.264, while Safari doesn’t support Ogg Theora at all.

As a side note, a big part of this “video war” is due to Ogg Theora itself…not only in terms of existing Flash videos having to be re-encoded to the Ogg Theora format…but Ogg Theora is also perceived as producing lower-quality videos than H.264…among many other things.

Still a little confused by all this video format/browser/HTML 5 stuff?  Well, you should be.  What started out as a way to make web video simpler for people has turned into a bit of a mess.

And it looks like the major video sites (where the vast majority of people go to watch video) will ultimately have the final say in how the whole HTML 5 video thing plays out.

Which brings us back to the title of this post…YouTube and Vimeo begin offering HTML 5 video.  Both of these sites, for now, and when it comes to HTML 5 video, have chosen H.264 over Ogg Theora.

That means you can go to Vimeo or YouTube and watch a limited selection of videos using HTML 5.  You’ll need Safari or Google Chrome or Chrome Frame on Internet Explorer to do this.  Firefox users are out of luck.

For YouTube, click here to join their HTML 5 beta program and watch HTML 5 videos.

For Vimeo, click here and select a video on their site.  In the lower right corner of the video description, you’ll see a blue link that says “Switch to HTML 5 player”.  Just click on it.  Or you can learn more about Vimeo’s HTML 5 video offerings be reading their blog post here.

About the Author

Dave Kaminski is a professional copywriter, videographer and 10-year veteran of direct response marketing whose work in multimedia advertising has resulted in millions of dollars worth of sales. A former U.S. Marine, Dave specializes in teaching entrepreneurs how to effectively use web video in their marketing efforts.

Dave also offers highly recommended online coaching classes on how to create web video, as well as promote and market them, for both MAC & PC users. For more information on creating web videos, please go here

|   Subscribe to Building Mailing Lists