SEO
Make the Most of Your Content on YouTube
YouTube is second only to Google, when it comes to search. YouTube receives over 3-billion views every single day. When my 4-year old broke his arm, I went to YouTube, not Google or Bing, to watch a video on how to make a sling. When I was making a dinner for 6, and trying to nail a recipe, I went to YouTube to see how to do it right. And I’m not the only one. We’ve been hearing it for a while now how video, as a medium, dominates search… and that spells big payoffs for YouTube.
With this in mind, it’s high time to start thinking – not just how to make more videos – but how to get your video content and your general video presence seen! The good news is, you already know how. We’re talking about basic SEO practices like those for Google, or any search engine.
There are literally dozens of tips for optimizing content for YouTube. Here are a few easy ones to get you started.
Post content frequently. Activity begets activity. Active channels get more attention. Every time you post new content on YouTube, it indexes that content. So in essence, each time you post, it’s like poking YouTube and reminding it you’re there. Posting frequently can also foster loyalty in your audience, and if it’s good content, posting frequently will grow your audience.
Encourage comments and respond to them. Just like a blog, each video should provoke comments or questions from your audience. Following up on each and every comment will show your audience you’re listening, and will encourage further interaction. Furthermore, responding to comments gives you more opportunity to showcase your humor, or expertise.
Use meta tags. Once again, just like content on a website, using meta tags helps YouTube correctly categorize your content and serve it up to the right audience when they come searching. Learn more about that here.
Transcribe your video content. This step is often overlooked but can make a big difference in the optimization of your content. Transcribing video means writing out each word that is spoken. The resulting script is rich with keywords and essentially gives YouTube a roadmap for your content. You can read more about transcribing here.
Want more? Here are 10 more tips you should know about YouTube.
Have more tips not listed here? Share them in our comments section.
Erin
Tags: SEO, tips, video, youtube
5 Tips For Your Foursquare Explore Social Strategy
If you haven’t claimed your foursquare profile yet, you might want to get on that asap! If the fact that the site’s database has 1.5 billion check-ins logged into the system isn’t enough of a an incentive, then perhaps knowing that foursquare has gone “search” online with their newest feature Explore with the website garnering 1 million unique visitors per day already could entice you.
By claiming your foursquare profile you can personalize it to suit your business and take advantage of integrating this platform into your social media (geo-location) strategy. In addition to checking-in, claiming badges and mayorships, now users can search for locations, deals, and places on their desktop using the Explore feature. Some people don’t like having a Foursquare account on their mobile phones and “checking-in” all the time, but would like to use this feature to see where their friends are checking-in and what they recommend. Foursquare Explore allows you to go online and search without having to use the platform as a check-in tool. It is useful for the end user to go through the 15 million tips that are gathered on the site already when deciding on where to go and what to eat… or drink!
Here are five tips to include in your strategy in order to ensure increased visits from Foursquare Explore to your company’s profile page:
- Regularly monitor your foursquare account. Review check-ins, comments, and tips to see what users are saying.
- Use QR codes to encourage check-ins, tips, and submissions.
- Promote Foursquare ads to encourage check-ins.
- Include sentiments and adjectives in your foursquare ad strategy (i.e. romantic, Friday, sweet, summer, wine list, etc…)
- Use keywords when posting deals on your foursquare account to help with search queries.
Happy searching!
Maryam
@socialmaryam
Tags: badges, explore, foursquare, geo-location, SEO, social, strategy, tips, visitors
Insights to Improving Your SEO
- When it comes to purchasing decisions, a recent study found women turn to social media for research, more than men. However, the study found search engines are the most popular resource for researching for purchasing decisions.
- New website content needs to go up, or be up on nights and weekends. Need to make sure your website is functioning at full capacity (as in: not down or slow) on nights and weekends. The reason? Spiders crawl most on weekends and nights.
- Don’t write for spiders. Write for people. A recent study showed people gauge trustworthiness of organic search results on the descriptions that appear in those results. So write for people not bots.
- General speaking, blog posts get the most uptake on Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday. Earlier in the morning is always best. The “Linkerati” (those who posts tons of links in social media) look early to figure out what they’re going to post.
- A blog post containing video gets more links, than blog posts with pictures. Don’t know why.. that’s just what the study found. So experiment with video in your blog.
- The more you post to your blog, the more links you get. That’s a fact.
- Conversations on your blog will not help your SEO. Links to your blog help SEO. Period.
- The optimum length of the title of a blog post, the sweet spot 40-100 characters. These get spread through social media the most. You will get better SEO results.
- The most important piece of SEO, and the hardest thing to get, is a link. The more links you can get, the better.
- Don’t worry about SEO as a tactic, think of it as a function of what you do. On that same note, Dan Zarrela said (emphatically) “Don’t hire an SEO consultant to help your SEO, hire a content producer.” You need good content more than you need a spider-tailored meta tag.
- The most linked-to words right now are:
1. recent
2. insights
3. soon
4. answers
5. analysis - The least linked-to words right now are:
1. settlements
2. franchise
3. deliverables
4. episode
5. carpet
Any surprises here for you?
Erin
Bad publicity now means less publicity, on Google
Last week the New York Times uncovered a story about an online vendor who has managed to leverage his bad customer service reputation into a top ranking on Google’s search engine.
The business owner was quoted saying “I’ve exploited this opportunity because it works. No matter where they post their negative comments, it helps my return on investment. So I decided, why not use that negativity to my advantage?” This strategy appears to have worked. The more furious the online chatter, the higher the site ranked in Google search, resulting in greater awareness of the brand and an increase in sales.
Google blogged saying “that being bad is, and hopefully will always be, bad for business in Google’s search results. And after quickly putting together a team Google is satisfied that they have developed a solution and it is already live.
Google outlined some obvious ways of solving the issue including blocking the offender, using sentiment analysis and placing user reviews next to search results, therefore exposing the negativity towards them. Instead they have created a new algorithm that detects extremely poor user experience and have incorporated it into their search ranking as an initial solution.
In this particular case, incorporating sentiment analysis in search ranking results is the right thing: shady business no longer profits from bad customer experience. But is sentiment analysis always a good thing?
There are reasons why we might not want Google to determine good sentiment vs bad for us in its web ranking. For example, if we wanted to look up something political and there was negative sentiment surrounding a particular leader, it may prove very difficult to learn more about a political situation. Sentiment analysis may also filter out bad reviews that are often very useful in doing research when making a purchase. The internet has always been a great resource for finding both good and bad reviews and information.
Although it seems as if Google has squashed the idea that any publicity is good publicity, there are sure to be more complex search discrepancies coming our way. Sentiment analysis has not been, and most likely will never be, completely mastered. The intricacies and nuances in language are difficult enough to comprehend face-to-face, let alone trying to develop an algorithm to decipher and make sense of it all (think: sarcasm). So, for now, we should continue to use our own intuition when considering sentiment analysis in search and maybe even dig a little further if we can’t find what we are looking for. After all, we can’t rely on Google to do everything for us.
Taylor
Tags: algorithm, google, ranking, search, search results, sentiment analysis
3 Steps to Search Engine Optimize Your Website
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of helping search engines discover what your website is about. SEO is important because it helps a website be seen and found in search engine results.
SEO can be a complex process that involves continued refinements over time, often by SEO professionals. However, there are some simple steps anyone can take to get a website off on the right…er… foot.
- Keyword research. Build an initial list of keywords potential customers may use when searching for the product or service you offer. Input these keywords in Google’s Keyword research tool to discover more keywords. Also use the tool to identify the monthly search volume for each keyword. A keyword that has very low search volume may not be worth optimizing for the website.
- Update Website. Review the contents of your website. Identify which keywords on your list will be a natural fit for each webpage. Select 1 – 2 keywords for each webpage and incorporate these keywords in the page’s title tag, description tag and page content. It has been suggested that repeating a word should never exceed 6 times on a page… assuming the page has at least 3 paragraphs of text.
- Gather Links. Inbound links play an important role for search engine optimization. Inbound links are links on other people’s websites that link to your website. Each inbound link can be seen as a vote for your site. The more high quality inbound links you have, the better. You may be able to quickly gather your initial set of inbound links from business contacts and alliances related to your business sector.
These are the first steps to search engine optimize your website. Every little steps counts when building your overall online strategy.
Victor
Tags: keyword research, links, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, tags
