YouTube channels are nothing new. They’ve existed in some form for years, but it is only recently that they have become a major force for launching new brands and products. Thanks to things like increased exposure via Playstation and Apple TV along with mobile and tablet video on the rise. The YouTube channel has grown as a great place to launch a brand.

Felicia Day’s Geek and Sundry Company launched on YouTube and Google Hangouts on April 1st and has already built up a huge following thanks to a big launch on YouTube. Felecia started out producing short films and games but ballooned into a small viral media empire. Geek and Sundry represents a huge leap as she launches various different products including internet publishing all funneled through her YouTube Channel. Day was able to take a little bit of buzz she built up thanks to her own site and build it into something huge using a YouTube Channel. And she did it all without spending much of anything on advertising.

One thing she did was do a large amount of cross promotion and build up her launch date in a big way. She found other websites and channels that had similar audiences such as Hardwick’s and cross promoted with them using giveaways on Twitter. Day used every form of social media including the brand new Google Hangouts to promote the launch of the YouTube Channel in a big way and it paid off with some great viral buzz that she fed continuously until her much publicized launch date.

Speaking of the launch date, Felicia Day held a massive launch day promotion that included a 12 hour streaming marathon on the brand new Google Plus Hangouts (Aside to YouTube and Facebook; make this more accessible. Streaming video is one thing you guys are lacking on and it’s going to make Google Plus look great in comparison.) This gave her some great buzz and even some trending topics on Twitter on her very first day of launch. She showed off her brand and made some great content for her YouTube channel while getting some great buzz all in one day and all without spending much. She made the launch of her new brand into an event and promoted it as such. She did it in a way any small business with a dedicated niche market can do. Remember, your niche audience is looking for things to talk about. All you have to do is find a way to get the ball rolling.

As I said, the new YouTube Channels are a good way to launch your brand and are great for SEO, but as just like the issues with streaming video, they still have some ways to go. As much as YouTube Channels are a great way to get your brand across there are still some drawbacks to putting your advertising dollars and your time into them as a launch pad for your brand. “They need to find an easier way for people to see them.” Hardwick said, noting the leaps they’ve already made as far as digital streaming to television goes. “YouTube needs to make your channel ‘one click away’ just like any other TV network. When that does all come together, Day, Hardwick, and anyone else along for the ride that develops a base there could be in for a major windfall.

“How to Boost YouTube Views with Web Marketing Know-How”

YouTube stars get Hollywood Superagents

Rush Order Tees Launches New YouTube Channel

We need tools like search engines to help organize and make sense of all the data we’re producing. In order for us to make sense of all this data it means making the right stuff ‘findable’ at any given time. This is where Search Engine Optimization (SEO) comes in. The search engines are doing their best to index your site’s relevant content, but there are things you can (and should) do to make sure they are successful. Search engines get better all the time, but they’re still just robots and can not reason the same as you and I. They scan your content and your markup and collect what they ‘think’ is valuable. Until some significant computing breakthrough’s occur, It’s your job to provide them with hard data that matches your concept of what the site actual is meant to embody. This will, in turn, make you more easily findable to human searchers.

SEO can be tricky. It is not comprised of a singular practice, but rather a collection of several practices that can vary from project to project. These practices carry different weight in effecting the search rankings and due to ever-changing search engine algorithms different practices can become more or less important over time.

Confused yet? What’s worse is the search engine companies don’t really even come out and tell everyone what the secret sauce is. Periodically they leak out bits of information on their algorithms, but they are closely guarded secrets for the most part.

So, what should you be doing to implement SEO into your site? Here’s a basic run down of essential techniques for Content, Markup, & Server-side SEO:

• Write copy that is naturally keyword rich (not stuffed). This means being honest. Don’t try to trick the search engines.
• Make content visible to the search engines. Currently, technologies such as Flash, Javascript, and Ajax can make content harder to index.
• Create an XML sitemap so the search engines can easily crawl and index your site. You can learn how to create one here.
• Name your files and folders in a descriptive manner. Use keywords whenever possible.
• Keep keyword density around 7-9%. Anymore than that is not going to have a natural tone and you could get penalized by the search engined for going too much over that. Several free online tools exist.
• Abundance of inbound/outbound links affect your page ranking. Search engines like sites that promote linking.
• Follow all best practices and web standards when marking up your pages. This will help ensure that the search engines don’t have trouble indexing your site and give your content hierarchy. Search engines take this into account when they run their algorithms. Head tags (<h1>, <h2>, <h3>…) are a good example of this.
• Make the most of your <title> tag. It weighs heavily in determining ranking. Keep it under 12 words (70 characters) and remember to keep the language natural. Don’t just stuff keywords in.
• Keep URLs clean and meaningful with keywords in them if possible
• META description tag – Like the Page title tag, it also weight heavily on the search results rankings. Utilize this tag for every page in your site if possible. Try to keep it to around 150 characters. It can be longer, but most search engine result pages will truncate your copy if it is.
• Anchor tags – The text labels for links are perceived as one of the most critical places to position relevant keywords.
• Alt tags. These help make content such as images visible to the robots. Using them is a standard accessibility practice as well.

Of course there are many more techniques you may want to consider depending on your goals and the site you are trying to optimize. As mentioned above, search algorithms change and sites like Google frequently experiment with ways to improve and keep up with the landscape of the web. Various content types such as images,video, and real-time data are starting to play a larger roll in how search results pages are populated and new ways of indexing this data are always emerging. At a certain point you may want to consider seeking the services of a professional if your site is complex or has some cutting edge features. At the very least, try and be pro-active in learning about the basics of SEO and keeping an ear to the ground concerning changes within the field.

Further reading:

Ambient Findability: by Peter Morville

Building Findable Websites: by Aaron Walter

Optimize Javascript Code

1. Minimize DOM Access. Manipulating the DOM is very resource intensive for browsers.
2. Smart Event Handlers. Use Event Delegation. You can put on event handler on a container div and then figure out which button inside that div was actually clicked in the function to be executed.
3. Reduce size of private functions (those called only within the js itself, not those called in other documents). So function foobar() would become function a() .
4. Use local variables whenever possible
5. Use the IF statement when
   1. There are no more than two discrete values for which to test
   2. There are large number of values that can be easily separated into ranges
6. Use the SWITCH statement when
   1. There are more than 2 but fewer than 10 values in which to test
   2. There are no ranges for conditions because the values are nonlinear
7. Use array lookup when:
   1. There are more than 10 values to test
   2. The results of the conditions are single values rather than number of actions to be taken.
8. Avoid the FOR-IN loop
9. Use Duff’s Device for looping through arrays when you notice a bottleneck in loops that process a large number of items
10. Alias  javascript properties like foo.style or document.getElementById

Optimize Images

1. Use smushit.com or punypng.com to remove any unwanted metadata from your images.
2. Since smushit.com doesn’t strip meta from jpeg you can do it manually with jpegtran
3. Be sure to always check between gif, png 8, png 24, and jpg when saving images for the web to ensure that you’re using the format that will yield the smallest file size.
4. Optimize CSS sprites to go horizontally instead of vertically, combine similar colors to keep color count low (in other words have a sprite with all green together and  another with brown, but only do so if it keeps file size lower and http requests down. Only do it if it will not yeild higher http requests and not yeild higher file sizes. the whole point is to reduce those factors.) Also don’t leave big gaps between image in the sprite.
5. Favicon – Get one. Browers will get a 404 error even if you don’t have one. 404s are slow to respond. So keep it under 1k and be careful about your expires header since you can’t rename the file if you want to change it.
6. png 8 is able to save full alpha transparency but only at 256 colors and only from fireworks or some other app than photoshop. I can greatly reduce size from png 24.

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