Month: May 2012

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Should You Use YouTube Embedded Video or Flash?

For web designers, it is a question that is troubling – should you embed a YouTube video in your website page or should you render the video into Flash. There are cases to consider using either.

Embed a YouTube Video

You want want to pull the “share” <iframe> video code to embed your website page if you have an active YouTube channel or want to drive traffic to it. Loading your video onto YouTube makes it shareable not only for your site, but for others as well. Additionally, YouTube makes sharing your video easy on a blog.

Render Your Video into Flash

This used to be the preferred way for a website designer to share a video on a web page. The super snappy load time and ability to control the size and frame design made it a preference, but not necessarily today in our world of smartphones. Remember iPhones still can’t read Flash. Using a Flash video solved the problem that some browsers USED To have with <iframe> code which is not a problem today.

My Preference

My preference is to use the <iframe> from YouTube for embedding video in website pages. Even just two years ago, the Flash route gave more compatibility, but in today’s world YouTube video embed code is definitely the way to go.

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Google Places Know the Attributes You Can Change

Don’t be scammed by Google Places optimization services, and here’s why there are only certain fields that Google Places now allows you as the business owner to update. Here is the list:

  1. Name
  2. Address
  3. City
  4. State
  5. Zip Code
  6. Country
  7. Main Phone Number
  8. Five Service Category but only from Google’s list
  9. Five of your own categories
  10. Latitude and Longitude

That’s it! No keyword dense title or business description, nothing  more than the list above. If you are approached by a supposed Google Places optimization service that says you need a special title and more keyword density, understand that they are not selling a program that they can deliver. You can only affect changes to the above elements.

If they say they will load hundreds of reviews, steer clear of them. There is no faster way to get your listing banned on Google Places than to have suddenly a bunch of new reviews suddenly appear. Once banned, you may never be able to get back in and with a strong location focus as the future of search, you could really be creating future problems for yourself.

For more information you can check out the attributes on this Google page.

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Got 10 or More Locations for Google Places? Use the New Bulk Upload Option

Google just released a new Google Places bulk upload option for businesses that have 10 or more locations and want to upload their account using a spreadsheet. Once you use the verification tool for the first ten businesses, you won’t have to go through the verification process again.

This new bulk upload option is available for all account from a link in the Google Places interface. What this tool is not, is a way to scam Google Places with fictitious addresses. You’ll get nailed on that one, so don’t waste time trying.

Although this feature is not for every business owner, it will make it easier for larger businesses to manage their locations and perform updates quickly. You can view the tutorial from Google Places to see if this may be a tool perfect for your needs.

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Microsoft Updates Name to Bing

This was announced recently: “…Our small and medium business brand is changing from “Microsoft Advertising” to “Bing.”” Although it appears that the advertising product will still be called adCenter, it appears that Microsoft is working to brand itself more consistently with the Bing brand. There may be additional strategies at play such as differentiating Microsoft’s online presence from its software presence. As to that, only time will tell.

In the meantime understand that Bing is much more than advertising on the Bing.com search engine. Bing results and Bing advertising is shown on the Yahoo, Bing, and even the Facebook platform. Of additional importance just this past week was Bing’s announcement that throughout the summer they will be rolling out a very tight search integration with Facebook.

From the images released, it appears that when you will search on Bing in the future, Facebook friends faces and comments about a product or place will appear on the left sidebar of your Bing search results page.

All in all, both statements are big news and let us know that in the bigger schemes of search there is some serious consolidation happening behind the scenes between the key social players like Facebook and Microsoft now known as Bing.