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What makes a video good for attracting page views? Well, if you take a look at this YouTube video of someone mowing their lawn you might be forgiven for thinking that anything goes.

As I write, “Dom’s Boring Video” has had 39,021 views including me — TWICE! That makes it the most viewed and most discussed video in the United Kingdom and the 35th most viewed and FOURTH most discussed in the world.

It consists of  nine minutes and 43 seconds of a bloke mowing his lawn.

Alternatively, you can “Watch Paint Dry” for 10 minutes and 4 seconds, “The Most BoringYouTube Video ……. Ever” for 7 minutes and 25 seconds or “Most boring movie on YouTube” for a mere one minute and 11 seconds.

However, none of these (or the trillion other pretenders to the YouTube Ennui title) are doing as much business as Dom’s Boring Video. Why?

The simple answer is publicity: Dom’s Boring Video is a production of the UK’s number one youth-oriented morning radio programme, The Chris Moyles Show, and were it not for this there’s no way it would be breaking records.

The only surefire way to get people to watch your video is to make it interesting and make it relevant.

The dream of any content marketer — as far as online movies go — is to strike lucky with a viral  video. A while ago Tech Crunch carried a candid piece by viral marketer Dan Ackerman Greenberg which detailed the lengths he went to with his Comotion Group to achieve viral status.

As I launch a series of videos linked to my day job, one tip springs to mind.

YouTube provides three choices for a video’s thumbnail, one of which is grabbed from the exact MIDDLE of the video.

As we edit our videos, we make sure that the frame at the very middle is interesting. It’s no surprise that videos with thumbnails of half naked women get hundreds of thousands of views. Not to say that this is the best strategy, but you get the idea.

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A friend of mine has recently launched a blog on an unsuspecting world, starting from scratch.

She downloaded a copy of WordPress, bought some blog-only web space for a startling £27 a year and took one of the many WordPress themes and tweaked the content until it looked right to her. This all happened on June 27.

Then she regularly surfed the web news directories, pulled out the stories that caught her eye, rewrote them and stuck them on her new site at the rate of at least three a day.

Now, with a bit of a tweak here and there, and the inclusion of a WordPress plug-in that creates a sitemap on the fly, she is beginning to scent the sweet smell of success. While her blog has no PageRank and so far no-one is linking to it, she is already getting a daily index from Google and others.

I can’t tell you much more. I’ve promised that I won’t let on what the blog is called, or link to it: apparently, she’s using it as a test bed to see just how hard (or easy) it is to get top SEO purely from content. If it were me, I’d be shouting it from the rooftops, but then I’m a bloke so I have an ego to massage.

I can admit that I’m extremely jealous of her success because for technical reasons I’m still unable to add any pages to the site which is my day-job.

But my friend is right. It proves that once you take away all the coding factors, like semantic XHTML and proper linkage to and from the site, good SEO is REALLY all about content these days.

Provide good content, and provide it regularly, and Google and its rivals will come knocking.

According to best estimates of when the next PageRank update takes place, we have just 55 days to see how much daily indexing equates to good PR.

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So hidden text on the web is a BAD THING, we all know that. Gone are the days when it was considered cool to stick loads of words on a page — usually at the bottom — in the same colour as the background, possibly in 5px type.

Of course the search engines got wise to this “keyword loading”: it contributed nothing to the content of the page, after all. It got dumped into that category of “Blackhat technique”.

Good content is all about value to the reader and every word should count, so stuffing lots of “invisible” text on a page is simply wasted pixels. If you want to increase the keyword densities of your pages, simply write more (or at least write better).

But hang on. Never say never. There is a very good reason for including “invisible” text on your page, and not just the correct use of alt- and title-tags.

Those with a visual impairment rely on the text on a page completely: pretty pictures make no difference to them, so make the page work for people who can only read text. That means fully explaining text links and adding blocks of text to substitute for images.

This is all achieved using the CSS attribute display: none;

Create a style called .accessible (or .ted or .jarvis or whatever, it’s not important) thus …

.accessible {display: none;}

Now, any time you want to add “hidden” text, you can do it simply by wrapping it inside this class.

That means that the phrase …

The <span class=”accessible”>cat sat on the </span>mat

renders to an ordinary browser as …

The mat

but to a screen reader as …

“The cat sat on the mat”

Of course it’s a frivolous example but you might use this technique to improve a list-based navigation.

On SmartLiveCasino.com we currently have a left nav where the code is a horrible table-based affair (I promise it will change) …

<table width="180" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"
 class="bgrleftmenu">
     <tr>
       <td width="20">
       <img src="../images/default/spacer.gif" width="20" 
        height="36"></td>
       <td colspan="2" class="headerleft">Menu</td>
       </tr>
       <tr>
       <td colspan="3">
       <img src="../images/default/spacer.gif" width="20" 
        height="8"></td>
     </tr>
     <tr>
       <td>&nbsp;</td>
       <td width="13">
       <img src="../images/default/spacer.gif" width="4" 
       height="7"></td>
       <td width="147">
       <a id="ctl00_LeftUserMenu1_LeftMenu1_hlinkHome" 
        class="linkyellow12" 
        href="default.aspx">Home</a></td>
     </tr>
     <tr>
        <td>&nbsp;</td>

     ...

        <td>
        <img src="../images/default/spacer.gif" width="4" 
         height="7"></td>
        <td>
        <a class="linkyellow12" 
         href="../en/help.aspx">Home</a></td>
     </tr>
     <tr>
       <td colspan="3">
       <img src="../images/default/spacer.gif" width="1" 
        height="12"></td>

     </tr>
   </table>

However, the Semantic alternative is not only much more elegant, it works better in terms of accessibility AND in terms of SEO!

<h2><span class="accessible">Site </span>Menu</h2>
   <ul>
      <a href="./." title="Go to the Home Page">
      <li>
      <span class="accessible">Go to the </span>Home<span
       class="accessible">Page</span>
      </li>
      </a>

      ...

      <a href="../en/help.aspx" title="Need Help? Get it here!">
      <li>
      <span class="accessible">Need </span>Help<span
       class="accessible">? Get it here!</span>
      </li></a>
   </ul>

In a common or garden web browser both of these would produce a standard vertical navigation …

:: Home
…
:: Help

But via a screen reader you get ..

:: Go to the Home Page
…
:: Need Help? Get it here!

“But what’s the point of all this?” I hear you cry. “Are you just being nice to blind people?”

Well, yes — and remember that a MAJORITY of the world’s population has some sight impairment — but there’s one “blind” individual that’s important to everyone interested in content and SEO: your local search engine.

Search engines, whatever flavour (but we’re all thinking Google, aren’t we) are effectively “blind”. That text-light, image-heavy page may look good to humans with perfect eyesight and a true sense of colour dynamics, but to Google it’s just a load of source code.

Make your site more accessible to those with a visual impairment and you also make it more accessible to the search engine spiders, but use a technique like this and you actually get more keywords on your page with no penalties!

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My current project — smartlivecasino.com — is meant to be visually attractive. It’s an entertainment experience, after all.

Unfortunately, the people who originally designed the site saw it more as a work of art than a sales tool. As a result, there are loads of pretty pictures, most of which don’t even have alt-tags, and little actual text.

To the human eye it looks fine, but to any ONE — or any THING — not relying on vision there’s a problem. Strip away the imagery and there’s very little for a search engine spider to index except for a few links and disconnected phrases: not exactly what you’d call good content. No doubt we’ve all seen worse: sites where even the text is displayed as a GIF image, and an un-tagged one at that.

For good SEO any site needs words, and sentences made up from these words, and paragraphs made from these sentences. The bottom line is that only by increasing the number of words on a page can one hope to improve keyword densities to that sweet spot of between 5% and 15% of the total.

Indeed, the current version of smartlivecasino.com comes close to running the risk of agitating the search engines because the density of certain keywords is greater than 20%: to a search engine that could look like “blackhat” SEO.

But before undertaking a major redesign, can anything else can be done to improve matters?

Well, remember the bit about any ONE? If you consider the page from a disability access standpoint, there are plenty of things that could be done to make it more useful to someone with a visual impairment, or a search engine.

A good first step would be to alt-tag all the images using clear keyword-rich phrases. A stage further would be to add keyword-rich TITLE tags to images, links and any other media. Neither of these measures would disturb the look of the page in any way but they would give more content for the search engines to spider.

However, the line NEVER to cross is to include hidden text in your page, artificially increasing the keyword density by peppering it with white text on a white background or commented out phrases which bear no relation to the code. That sort of thing WILL get you in Google’s bad books.

I say “never” but it depends on what you mean by hidden; however, that’s another post …

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