Google+ Plugins, Video Sitemaps, Pinterest For Business, Speedlink 09:2012

DiTesco 3263 Views, , ,
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Hi everyone. hope you all has a great week. What’s new? Undoubtedly, buzz was all over the place regarding Google’s new single privacy policy (took effect March 1), Facebook’s timeline for pages, and on a lesser degree, Google’s new plugins for websites. Recently launched, Google’s new plugins for websites now include badges and icons for your brand or personal profile. Instead of using 3rd party widgets (which often times are down), you can now use Google’s official badges for brands/profile and create one for you. In addition, they also released a small Google+ style guide to help you promote better your pages (worth the look).

On a different forefront, I finally got an invite for GentleMint, supposedly a Pinterest version, that is geared for the “male” audience. For now, I have to admit that it is pretty quite in there. Been doing some “experiments” and as soon as I find out more, I’ll let you know.

As usual, in no particular order:

Blogging/Online Business (tips and tools)

Pinterest for Business

SEO/Marketing

Social Web/Other Stuff

  • How To Tweet The Same Information Without Looking Spammy basicblogtips.com
  • Facebook Timeline for Brands: What Does This Mean for Marketerssocialmediatoday.com
  • How To Find Out Which WordPress Plugins Are Making Your Site Slow just-ask-kim.com

Video Sitemaps

If you have some videos in your website, you should know that “normal” sitemaps do not include several information about videos you are using. Using video sitemaps is recommended to give Google more information about your videos. If you have not it yet, I suggest you do. BTW, use this plugin to make your life easier – Video XML Sitemaps.

DiTesco

DiTesco is a Business and Inbound Marketing Consultant, and founder of iBlogzone.com. iBlogzone's main objective is to help startups and small business owners achieve success in their online ventures. | More About Me and my Digital Marketing Services in SP Brazil.

25 thoughts on “Google+ Plugins, Video Sitemaps, Pinterest For Business, Speedlink 09:2012”

  • you know, one day I will get out of my cave and investigate some of these social networks! hehe, I use google+ at work while I’m waiting for orders and occasionally facebook.

    twitter is on tweetdeck all the time so I see that a lot.

    oh wait, come to think of it… I’m never off them! haha

    • LOL, Andy. Curious when I started reading, I kinda suspected that you will eventually end up saying that you are always on top of these networks 🙂

  • Google+ is fast getting more and more registered users. But it still remains to be seen how much of them are actually active on this social network. Currently, I don’t think anybody is using this network for connecting with friends, family and colleagues.

    Google+ is mostly used by small business owners, online marketing firms and SEOs. I hope Google releases the active users data soon, so that we can get a clear picture.

    Thanks for all these updates.

    • Yes I agree with your point mostly people using Google + for business purpose just I saw Facebook provide perfect functionality for interaction with family friend and enjoy social network sites.But you can’t forget the importance of pinterest it’s a good and Seo friendly specially you can get more traffic and hit with promoting your business with proper boarding and pining.

  • Hey there DiTesco,
    I’ve never understood the concept behind video sitemaps for YouTube videos and when I tried this plugin before it did not generate the site map correctly. I never took the time to figure out why though. Since I’m trying to build up my YouTube following just as much as I am my blog, it’s fine by me if my YouTube video appears in search instead the embedded one on my blog. Pretty much anyone who see my video on YouTube will at least hear about my blog anyway.
    If I wasn’t trying to built up my YouTube audience than maybe this would make more sense to me.
    What does make perfect sense is when people are hosting videos on their website (not YouTube) with some of these other services like Wistia or BrightCove for example. You absolutely need the video sitemap in that case.

    Anyway I didn’t want to start trouble, but I wanted to get that off my chest 🙂

    Thank you for the videos.

    • Haha, Ileane. Glad you got that out of your chest:). Anyway, in your case, maybe creating video sitemaps are not as important considering that most of the videos you embed on your blog are actually your videos and you are building your channel. Video sitemaps are indeed better for blogs that are hosting other peoples videos because it helps determine even further the “general” topic of the blog, provided of course that they are relevant. As you know, most of the videos I use are from GWT or other news sites where some of them are from Vimeo. In my case, it does make sense creating such sitemaps.

      Anyway, I am using the plugin and it is working very well. It actually just “picks” up all the embedded videos and generates the sitemap. Wonder it did not work for you…

      • Hi DiTesco,

        Now I understand this more from your point of view. Over on my blog I left a link to an article on SEOMoz and there is a hot debate going on in the comments. I don’t have the link right now, but let me know if you see the post and what you think.

        • Hi Ileane. I saw the link and read the post you linked to. Indeed the post explains pretty well why one should use a video sitemap as well as the advantages of using one. IMO, if you have a “videoblog” for example, that method would certainly be useful (better) and the method I am using is a bit more simple for sites with lesser amount of videos. I also found that using the old code is better for indexing as it lays a map of the link to the video. Using YouTube to linkback is great but there is also the matter of linking to the video itself 🙂 I guess at the end of the day, it depends.. the only thing I understood in all this is that it can help 🙂

          • There’s so much to consider that it still has my head spinning. Thanks for your guidance and advice on the matter. I’ll give the plugin a second try later today and keep you posted.

            • Ileane. Too much stuff does make our head spin and sometimes I don’t know which one should I do first or even if I should do it at all, lol. Just checked on Google Webmaster Tools and they just added another 80 URLs on their index only because of the videos. Now I will see in the next few days or weeks, if this actually brings something 🙂 BTW, if you do decide to use the plugin, rest assured that it is from a reliable source. It is developed by LabNol of Digital Inspiration.. good dude 🙂

              • DiTesco, I installed the plugin and when I submitted the video sitemap to webmaster tools, this is the error message that I get
                “This XML tag has an invalid value. Please fix it and resubmit.”

                I’m not sure how to resolve that one. I’ll dig around to see if I can find the answer and let you know what I come up with.

                • Hi Ileane. Wonder why it is giving you that error. I just saw your sitemap > http://basicblogtips.com/sitemap-video.xml and it appears to be just fine. Hope you get that sorted out. BTW, did you tick the “include video duration”? If you did, try “unticking” it. Really weird. Sorry about that 🙁

  • Thanks Francisco for mentioning my Link Building Resources post!! Looking at this list, it’s in great company 🙂

    Also – the page is actually pointblankseo.com/link-building-resources instead of jcooper.wpengine.com. My site was migrating to a new host so that was the URL for a little while, so if you could change it, that would be outstanding. Sorry!

    • Hi Jon. Thanks for stopping by. Sorry about your link, rectified it. BTW, awesome article and a great resource indeed 🙂

      • Thanks!! I couldn’t find a one all end all resource to point link building newbies to, so as much as it was a post for my blog, I also made it for a new link builder I just hired 🙂

  • Nice roundup as usual = I checked out GentleMint – seems like a cool concept..If you get any invites to share…:-)

    • Hey Dan. I do have a couple more invites to share. Still interested? Let me know where to send it 🙂

      • Hey DiTesco,

        Would you mind shooting me an invite to GentleMint as well 🙂 ?
        My email is [email protected].

        Would be great if you could 😀

        Thanks

        • Hi Linda. Your invite is on the way. Hope you get and don’t forget to friend when you are there 🙂

  • Personally, I use the Google plus and I like it but I use it in conjunction with other buttons like the FB like button and tweet button. Nice article.

  • very nice collection of valuable articles DiTesco , i think you work hard to collect these all . may i right ?

  • A very interesting and informative post. As a newbie to Pinterest, you have totally convinced me that it has a lot of benefits.

  • DiTesco, we ran out of room above! LOL!

    Yes, I unticked the video length because I thought that might cause some conflict. I checked the FAQ on the plugin page and I saw something similar and the resolution involved changing permissions on FTP, which I think is really bizarre, but I’ll keep digging because I’m not sure this is the same issue. If all else fails, I’ll post the question on Labnol’s Facebook page.

  • I am totally clueless about Pinterest and am excited to learn about it and how I can use it.. Thanks for sharing.

  • Having a video sitemap would be better because it gives us the
    exposure in Google video results as well as the normal search. Thank
    you.

    Best Regards!

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