Search engines have been around long enough for traffic-minded marketers to whittle down SEO and SEM to a near science – okay, an exact science sans the key algorithm variable. But what is known about optimizing video content on YouTube? Next to nothing, that’s what.

That doesn’t stop the especially enterprising from trying to figure it out before the traditional advertising companies do, though. As far as the SEM community goes, they may soon claim YouTube optimization (or video optimization if you prefer) as their inherent turf.

According to a story in the Wall Street Journal this morning (reg. required), entertainment colossus Viacom has signed a distribution deal with Joost, the peer-to-peer streaming television service that Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom started up with the billions they made selling Skype.

The biggest challenge that most managers or work team leaders face when they decide to use a wiki is getting their coworkers to use it too. Some organizations have been extremely effective at getting mass participation on their wikis, others have simply failed altogether.

Social networking site MySpace has branched out into the world of comic books. Late last week MySpace launched MySpace Comic Book community, “a Place for Comic Books”.

I lived to see this day come to bear .. Myspace sending SPAM "member" emails, to an email address, that doesn’t exist (bliggy[at]bliggs.com), on one of my domains.

All the headers are legit, and the "member" email is sent to a "confirmed email". Go figure guys.

I’ve recently been on a particularly aggressive link buying spree.

Although as a SEO I know buying links means buying some degree of placement on search engines, and Google is the main target.

However, I’m buying for informational sites – communities and blogs – with no real revenue streams.

So instead of trying to link bomb for money keywords, I’m trying to hit longtail search traffic, which may bring in much more targeted traffic – traffic either more likely to join a community or subscribe to a blog feed, or else click out via paid ads.

Have you ever submitted a story to a social site like Digg and then messaged a few of your friends through AIM and told them to vote for it? There is nothing wrong with this but they probably know what you are up to, here’s why.

Usually when users vote on stories, they go to the homepage of a site such as digg.com, roam around, and then vote on stories they like. But when you spam your AIM buddy list and get people to click on a direct link to a Digg story URL it shows up in Digg’s logs that they came directly to that URL.

The link baiting season promised to be one of the highlights of SES London. With linkbait being one of the hottest contemporary SEO themes, the crowds filled the room to hear what the industry experts were going to share.

The widget as link bait

First up, Nick Wilson gave a good high level introduction to ‘viral link building’. Giving a passionate speech, Nick discussed widgets as the ultimate linkbait, and his observations were well worth hearing.

Heellloou Jason Calacanis

If you were at SES London, you might have heard one or two little nuggets that seemed inconsequential at first, but were probably more important than you realise.

I was lurking toward the back of the room at the Linking Strategies Session when (I think) Tom Alby from Ask made a comment about hubs and authorities. He said that the difference between a link farm and a hub is that at least one or two authority sites would be linking back to the hub.

Bella posted an interesting comment today – here – on my post about the opportunity for analytics in which she commented on Tom Davenport’s POV in Competing on Analytics.

If you haven’t gotten the message yet that your website content needs to be as original and niche as possible for long-term search engine visibility, it’s time to get it and to hold on to it as you might the long tail as it pulls you along. But generating that extra searchable content isn’t a picnic, now is it?

The search landscape and how engines supplied results and paid links to other search engines has changed, as a once-chaotic environment of multiple sites has shaken out to one towering peak among them all.

After squabbling with YouTube and demanding that they pull over 100,000 copyrighted videos two weeks ago Viacom has struck a deal with Internet television service Joost. Under the agreement, Viacom’s divisions including MTV Networks, BET Networks and Paramount pictures will provide programming on the Joost platform.

Business Week looks at the battle to dominate the mobile search space and its estimated $11.4 billion ad spend by 2011.

While Google has the lead, Yahoo is making a strong challenge and there are a many white-label providers out there.

We should have suspected YouTube’s chances of signing a deal with Viacom were nil, when the cable company demanded more than 100,000 video clips be removed from the Google-owned video site.

Local search marketing tactics need to consider the needs of the desired customer base, and where they might go to satisfy those needs.

I feel bad for the guys at MyBlogLog. Ever since being acquired by Yahoo, they’ve not exactly had a comfy ride. Things escalated this weekend, with reports that spammers had found an exploit that allowed them to add themselves as "co-authors" on as many communities as they wished.

Excuse my giddiness, but it’s definitely addictive to look at your keyword quality scores. You could have guessed them before by the assigned minimum bids, but these are fun to look at anyway:

Fairly regularly in the blogosphere you hear people complaining about how few people reading their blog go the next step and leave a comment.

I recall that last year, Darren Rowse posted his "10 Techniques to Get More Comments on Your Blog", linking to a Jakob Nielsen study that found that

In the last few years the blogosphere has swelled, or evolved perhaps, from a loose and obscure collection of early adopters shooting from the hip into an all-encompassing theater of discourse. In this theater nowadays, your presence as a business professional is just short (very short) of required, but shooting from the hip, or half-arseing your online presence, is an enterprise best left to the MySpace drones.

WebProNews guest correspondent Debbie Harrison has provided us with more coverage of the Search Engine Strategies conference in London. Today’s coverage will focus on local search marketing.

* Yes\n* No\n* I don’t care\n* I don’t even know what that means\n* CowboyNeal\n

In a time when the Internet can place individuals on level ground with multi-national corporations, the way to fix YouTube’s search may be by treating some content sources as being more important than others.

Where does a major Internet company with a $143 billion market cap and millions of dollars in cash in the bank turn to when it’s time to create an ad campaign for Gmail? To its cube dwellers, of course.