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.

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.

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.

One site I worked on had a left nav where the code was a horrible table-based affair …

<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> <aclass="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 was not only much more elegant, it worked 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!

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 …

Smart Live’s “twist” is just that: it’s live roulette, streamed via webcam or broadcast on UK digital television (SKY 851 and Freeview 22) from early evening to the wee small hours, presented by attractive croupiers, in a relaxed style.

I’ve never been much of a gambler myself, although I’ve always enjoyed the spectacle of gambling events like casinos or horseracing. And the vast numbers of people who flock to the great gambling meccas like Las Vega or the Aintree Grand National show just how popular it is. For most, it’s just a hobby: a way to release tension at the end of a busy day. And for most, it’s completely harmless. Sure they may lose occasionally, but don’t we all take risks every day and aren’t we okay if things don’t go quite as we’d planned.

Still, there is an understandable air of uneasiness when it comes to the subject, especially when people don’t want to be seen to publicly endorse a lifestyle which others object to.

This has proved to be a problem in relation to our attempts to launch a Pay Per Click campaign with the world’s biggest search engine company, Google.

Google (motto: do no harm) has a strict policy when in comes to online gambling advertising — they don’t do it! Geographical casinos are allowed, as are non-profit casino games such as those used by charities at social events. And if you make poker chips or roulette wheels, or have a surefire system to beat the house, you can advertise those too. So you will see PPC ads for gambling on Google properties when you search for relevant keywords.

However, you soon learn that some of these ads are not what they seem. The URL from a recent ad for “freegamblepackage.com” was

http://www.google.co.uk/aclk?sa=l&ai=BvJfi2WVWSImMB6HmQru-5ZgKscj_ Qb3ooq8FpbeaBfCzpQEIABABGAEoAzABOAFQn4rcigJgu76ug9AKoAHH teL5A8gBAYACAdkDLsK5FNgVhxjgAwg&sig=AGiWqty1Q9aMG-bEIwSlo_el85zW6e P2EQ&q=http://www.freegamblepackage.com/%3Faff%3D52123%26c%3D1.

However, after the inevitable blank screen where the background referral script worked out where it was being linked from, the page was redirected to http://www.primecasino.com/?aff=52123, which is a rival online casino and therefore not allowed under Google rules.

What’s going on here is an affiliate scheme; not of itself illegal (even Smart Live Casino is dipping a toe into the partnership model) but in the way campaigns like the one above currently operate, it’s just downright sneaky. In the above example, simply typing freegamblepackage.com into a browser produces a lame page for another surefire system to beat the roulette wheel, but in itself it is almost certainly a satellite website run by the affiliate marketeers.

Google say they are investigating and offenders will be removed. Another campaign run by online casino giants 888.com is (at the time of writing) now pointing to a geographical casino and not their online one.

Sadly, the reality is that as soon as these scams are stopped a new one pops up to take its place.

Another SEO manager told me recently that he didn’t believe in “ethical” SEO, and he is right … to an extent. Today’s “tweak” inevitably becomes tomorrow’s “White Hat technique” and next week’s “Black Hat swindle“. I would still err on the side of Google’s “Do No Harm”, although I might add “unless you know you won’t get caught”.

Me, I’m no gambler. I always believe I’ll get caught.

From a practical point of view, the amount of data involved is no great shakes: for example, one might compare the amounts involved with, say, the transaction history of a large retail site. It would take three years or so to accumulate as much data as this company produces as the retail site produces in a day. At this level, almost any type of database is available, even those with supposed scalability issues such as MySQL.

So if size is not important, what is?

In the first instance, resilience may be a problem, especially in the case of a media organisation tied to publication deadlines. Imagine the whole thing crashing, with perhaps an estimated restoration time of 18 hours.

• For online, such a delay may mean at least 18 hours of downtime, with associated loss of revenue from ad banners and click thrus as well as any online sales.
• For print, workarounds could probably mean that copy was saved locally and added to the database at a later time; however, the exact timing of the crash would be important — the closer to deadline, the more damaging.

With a large single database, every catastrophic outage would hit all teams. In this case some fall back position would be a necessity, for example real-time mirroring of the database. Yet the amount of data means than there would be little noticeable affect on performance.

An alternative would be a single large database with local repositories. In this case in the event of a catastrophic failure, teams could carry on using data stored in the repositories, with the main database being updated when it comes back online.

Another alternative is to use many smaller linked databases with front end software carrying out necessary housekeeping to ensure co-ordination. With a multiple database option it may be harder maintain integrity: with many smaller databases comes the opportunity for users to add their own tables (possibly complicating the situation). A multiple database solution would ideally require more complex policing.

The main overhead in all these scenarios is that the amount of data involved, which is not great. This should be an encouragement to mirror any datbase, no matter how big it might be to ensure continuity of supply in the event of calamity: this might also mean mirroring the databases at a remote venue to ensure complete security.

Like many media companies around today, its business model has changed dramatically to take on board different methods of broadcasting its output. And like many media companies around today, that business model has grown organically in an almost haphazard way, finding short-term fixes to meet the challenge of the moment.

This is not a question of cutting corners; much expensive work has been undertaken. But the bottom line is that media companies seldom have the luxury of stepping back from the everyday grind to properly assess where they are right now, let alone how they should progress from here.

That’s where I come in. As someone involved in content supply and manipulation for the best part of 20 years, I am a fresh pair of eyes. Nevertheless, the headaches have started to kick in around 11.30am each day, as I try to unpick the problems.

Simply put, they have added to their portfolio of databases as the years have gone by: from the weekly publication of a magazine, to the daily output of a web site and now the regular production of books, and all with the aim of running a joined-up operation, both online and off.

They now have three separate content databases, each with its own shelflife and tell-by dates; each with its peculiar naming conventions, and each with its needs and opportunities.

Is it possible to get all three databases talking the same language? It should be. After all databases are simple structured collections of information, manipulated by mathematical rules and logical expressions. Actually, it turns out in this case that what most of the protagonists really mean when they talk about a database is actually a Content Management System. It’s a forgiveable slip; after all, a CMS is simply the front end of a database. The complication is having THREE Content Management Systems feeding into three vectors of transmission — to the web AND print.

Right now, my first task is simply to describe this on paper: call it a springboard to a place where I can begin to formulate possibilities. What follows over the next six weeks is anyone’s guess. At least I’ve got a good supply of headache pills.

Yesterday, Barablu — my latest SEO project — felt the sting of demotion too. Its page rank fell one point, from 5 to 4.

Yet (as far as I can see) Barablu has NEVER in the past operated any dodgy practices, especially link buying: I wish the same could be said for the competition. No, the loss of a PR point in this case at least must be more than a Google moral backlash.

As usual, Google are keeping tight-lipped about the reasons behind the recent PR massacre and to be sure there are many sites around who’ve suffered more than Barablu. Yet, what makes this whole adjustment even more puzzling for me is that I know for a fact that sites which don’t exist are maintaining their page rank!

Now I’m not talking about some dodgy blackhat technique: the site in question — which I shouldn’t name for confidentiality reasons — ceased operations back in July because the owner couldn’t afford (or couldn’t be bothered) to pay his site dues. It was duly decommissioned and all the pages deleted; if you go there now you get the usual 404 errors.

However, if you search Google for the site right now you’ll be told that it has 41 pages and a PR of 4, albeit with no backlinks! As they say, go figure!

Go Tell The Marines!

In truth, Barablu’s real problem is years of unwitting, benign neglect. It was first in its field — making free calls using a mobile phone — and it still out-features the competition but it languishes in the lower reaches of the search engine rankings on almost all of its keyword phrases because, until now, no-one ever said anything. A recent comment on an Italian blog summed it up: “Even if Barablu is not very visible — not advertised properly — the software offers some interesting services you should try.”

As I write, I’m waiting to unleash a new Barablu website on an unsuspecting world, but for now all I can practically do is to encourage everyone here that I can to blog their socks off about Barablu and its associated technological fields via the Barablu Blog (catchy name, don’t cha think!).

For you see, as I think I’ve been saying for a while now, Content is King! And even with the meagre resources at hand right now, Barablu’s SEO is actually improving. See you at the top … .

In some cases the figure has dropped by as many as THREE places (remember PR is not a linear scale: a PR of 2 is not just TWICE as good as a PR of 1; it’s something like SEVEN TIMES better!)

Which begs two questions …

• Why have Google done this, and
• What does it mean for the affected sites?

Taking the second first, the answer is not entirely clear. PageRank has been a controversial issue for some while now; some even argue it’s meaningless. It’s usually summed up as “the number of good sites pointing to yours”, and although the precise PR algorithm has changed since the original Google patent, it’s still largely based upon “backlinks”.

Put very simply, the better the PageRank of sites which link to yours, the better your PageRank will be. Conversely, lots of links from poor sites can actually harm your page rank; that’s one reason why link-swapping campaigns are such poor value if your site is already doing well.

Incidentally, the PR you see in the Google Toolbar or other SEO tool may be misleading: Google calculates PageRank on a regular basis, but the figure it displays to the world is “out of date” by several months.

What’s behind Google’s recent PR raid seems to be a question over the validity of these backlinks. Of late, one of the tools of the professional SEO has been to sidestep the problem of gathering backlinks by natural, organic means — which usually takes a very long time — by running “backlink campaigns”. These exercises can often run into many thousands of dollars and consist of “buying” stories on well-placed blogs, and links from directories, forums and other sites. Sites like PayPerPost.com exist solely to put willing bloggers in touch with SEOs looking for another backlink.

Recently, however, Google announced a crackdown on websites and search agencies that were buying links in order to artificially ramp-up search position (you can see a fuller list of the sites affected here). This chimes in with the search giant’s stated aim of attempting to make web searches honest — if you search for something, they argue, what you should get is a list of the most appropriate sites, not those with the biggest SEO budget. Content, once more, is king!

This leaves me in a quandary. My day job is get the free mobile phone calls site Barablu.com back on the top of the heap where it belongs, and my weapon of choice is to improve the content of the site by writing more, getting more people to contribute and making the site itself more accessible, more usable and simply more fun!

However, one thing that Barablu lacks — mainly because, unlike the competition, it’s never bothered with SEO before — is backlinks. Barablu’s current PR is 5 and that’s lower than its rivals but (these days) suddenly higher than searchengineguide.com and seo-scoop.com. Suddenly, the attractiveness of a backlinks campaign is less than it was.

Besides, these days PageRank is just one of a hundred or so metrics used by Google to order web sites. Does that make it irrelevant? At the time of writing, this very site has a PR of ZERO, yet it still tops Google searches for some terms.

Yet on reflection, I still think PR is relevant. It still seems to have some bearing over just how often your site gets indexed and how deeply and there are many other differences you notice when your Google PR increases.

So I reckon backlink campaigns will continue, only probably much more carefully, and much less visibly.