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Guest Post by Ray Pawulich, VidCaster.com:

At VidCaster, we give our users the tools to build their own video site. We focus on making this process as easy and painless as possible, but also loaded with advanced features that help you maximize your ROI from online video publishing. One of these features is video SEO that "just works" right out of the box.

The Key to Video SEO: The Video Sitemap

As the name implies, video SEO is a subcategory of SEO (search engine optimization) focused on video. Unlike text-based content, video content is not inherently indexable by search engine crawlers. Just uploading a video file to your web-server is not enough for today's search engines to index that content as a video — if you want your content to come up when a user does a video search, you need to provide search engines with something called a "video sitemap".

Prior to the advent of tools like VidCaster, creating a video sitemap was a complicated, manual process. To make matters worse, search engines are constantly changing their desired format for a video sitemap, forcing you to stay on top of those changes and update your video sitemap yourself — not a great proposition if your goal is to focus on creating & promoting your content.

The end result of this way of doing things is that the vast majority of videos search results are driving traffic to video sharing sites like Vimeo and YouTube — not the sites of the creators of that content!

Luckily, VidCaster has revolutionized the creation of the video sitemap by making it automatic and invisible to the user, allowing video publishers to drive traffic to their own site without any additional effort.

Video SEO at Work

Let's take a look at an example of how Hackers and Founders, a current VidCaster client, is leveraging video SEO.

Because their video site is set up at hackersandfounders.tv (which means their brand name is right there in the URL), if we search for "Hackers and Founders" in Google, right on the first page of results we see a video coming from their site:

Not only is this the only video result shown on the page, but as an individual searching that brand name, I instantly know from the URL that this is official content coming directly from that brand — not user-generated content on a video-sharing site.

If we click through, we are taken to a landing page on that site:

Note that all the related videos are videos from Hackers & Founders — there is no way that the viewer can get lost to someone else's video. Try doing that on a video-sharing site!

By presenting the video in an environment over which they have full control, Hackers and Founders gives themselves the opportunity to use their video content to further a business goal — which, in this case, is to drive traffic toward their sponsor, Microsoft BizSpark. As you can see, they're doing though VidCaster's in-player call-to-action capabilities as well as with a traditional banner ad on the site (something that's also not possible on traditional video-sharing sites).

Advanced video SEO: leveraging the video site

For SEO experts, the concept of their own "video site" opens up many possibilities for boosting the organic ranking of not only their video site, but their main site as well. This is because, whether you have your video site set up on its own domain (such as hackersandfounders.tv) or as a subdomain (such as tv.airbnb.com), search engines will consider your video site wholly separate from your main site — even though you control both! This allows to strategically use cross-linking between the two in order to share the "SEO juice" one site might get to rank the other site higher for particular search terms.

Now even easier

Video SEO is a new and interesting space and VidCaster is proud to apply our "it just works" philosophy to this category. That's why we're also proud to announce a new partnership with iWantMyName — now if you use iWantMyName for domain name management, our service can be easily added to your domains with just one single click.

For more information about VidCaster, please visit www.vidcaster.com.

We've just finished re-designing some parts of the iWantMyName dashboard, making it even easier for you to set up domains. This new video shows you how to add Tumblr to a domain name at iWantMyName:

More services and applications to use with your domains can be found in the iWantMyName marketplace.

Online branding goes well beyond domain names. Nevertheless, they are an integral part of brand building and should be secured early on in the branding process. Entrepreneur Loic Le Meur shares some useful advice in his video series on how to build your own brand:

More episodes can be found on BuildYourOwnBrand.tv, a great example for domain branding with a .TV web address.

CNN Live News interview with Tina Dam from ICANN on topic of new Internationalized Domain Name (IDN) suffixes. The new development results in domain extensions such as .CN (China) or .GR (Greece) being available for users, expressed in their native languages and scripts.

The following internationalized country code top-level domains (ccTLDs) have already been approved by ICANN:

• United Arab Emirates (ae): .امارات
• China (cn): .中國 (traditional); .中国 (simplified)
• Egypt (eg): .مصر
• Hong Kong (hk): .香港
• Jordan (.jo): .الاردن
• Sri Lanka (lk): .ලංකා (Sinhalese); .இலங்கை (Tamil)
• Palestinian Territory (ps): .فلسطين
• Qatar (qa): .قطر
• Russian Federation (ru): .рф
• Saudi Arabia (sa): .السعودية
• Taiwan (tw): .台湾 (simplified); .台灣 (traditional)
• Thailand (th): .ไทย
• Tunisia (tn): .تونس

Source: Global by Design

With the demise of Geocities, it was only a matter of time before Google ramped up its website creation offering for the mass consumer market. Google Sites has been around for a while but this week they launched a new template gallery which further simplifies making your own personal or small business website.

The free website builder is aimed firmly at small companies, home users, schools and not-for-profits who just need to get online with a basic brochure quality set-up and who don't have corporate level online marketing budgets to spend. The new templates should drive a lot of interest in the service, which previously had only a low profile.

The introduction of Google Sites webpage templates is great news for iWantMyName customers because we already offer to link your domains through to free Google services. There are many templates available already, some examples from the directory are below.

Build your family website - Template:

Create a website for your restaurant business - Template:

Make a wedding website - Templates:

Customers managing their domains through iWantMyName get free provisioning so that they can hang all their Google docs, including GMail and Sites beneath their own personal domain name. So now you don't need a team of web experts to set up all the services you need for a home office, small or medium sized enterprise or not-for-profit organisation.

Droplr is a little Mac application that runs in your menubar and can be used for uploading, hosting and sharing files with your favourite Twitter client or other apps. What we really like with Droplr is the custom domain option. Simply enter your own short domain name into their web application, change the DNS A record settings and all links to your hosted files will contain your branded URL immediately.

It's best to see it in action so watch the demo video below and see how easy Droplr works with Twitter or email:

The service is currently in private beta but we could score some invites for you which will be raffled among all commenters to this blog post (don't forget to leave your email address).

ICANN, the internet's governing body, yesterday officially announced the introduction of Internationalized Domain Name (IDN) extensions for nations and territories. This means that a full web address including the domain suffix can contain non-Latin characters such as Chinese, Arabic, Hebrew or Greek in the future.

"The coming introduction of non-Latin characters represents the biggest technical change to the Internet since it was created four decades ago," said ICANN chairman Peter Dengate Thrush. "Right now Internet address endings are limited to Latin characters - A to Z. But the Fast Track Process is the first step in bringing the 100,000 characters of the languages of the world online for domain names."

Watch the video with people from around the world explaining how localized domain names will help them using the internet in their native language:

The introduction of internationalized country domains is an important step towards a global internet and we would like to congratulate ICANN and everybody involved in achieving this long-awaited milestone.

Offering an easy domain registration service was one of the main reasons why we've built iWantMyName. How many times have you been to your current domain provider and just wanted to buy a domain name but were presented with tons of different options, special offers or hosting plans that you really do not need at all? Maybe you even gave up completely because you didn't know what to do?

We are focussed on an easy domain registration process without all these hassles. This process starts on our home page where you will find only a search box and a few links (which completely disappear when you're logged in). The streamlined process continues with a search result page that brings you directly to the shopping cart without offering you unwanted additional products and ends with a simple confirmation page to finish your order. It's 3 steps in total and only takes 30 seconds as you can see in the following video: