SEO Strategy

The emphasis placed on links by Google over the last few years seems to have led many people to assume that you can “buy” ranking by acquiring inbound links without having properly focused content on the actual web pages being ranked.

Once you’ve done SEO for a while you realize how unrealistic it is to expect Google to give a high ranking to pages that don’t contain any useful information - links or no links - and especially when the keywords in question are fairly competitive.

I was reminded of this over the last week or so by two websites I was asked to evaluate. One was produced by a very credible business involved in relatively high end online activities. Their site was made completely in Flash and had virtually no identifying text, headlines, titles or other useful metadata. From the search engine point of view there was no way to tell what it was about. Consequently they did not even rank for their own domain name - which was also their primary keyword.

The other was similar, except in this case the site had no serious content, and much of it was “under construction.” A site like that is basically useless and doesn’t deserve to get ranking.

My advice in both cases: create some readable content, follow two or three of the most basic SEO rules and your problems will be solved. We’ll see if they take the advice.

Here’s another post by Loren Baker along the same lines: Don’t Sour Your Link Juice By Forgetting Basic SEO.

Youtube is the king when it comes to online videos and so it is helpful to know some tricks and tips to get more exposure for your videos when you put them on Youtube. After all, that’s the point isn’t it? To get more people looking at your video.

 Joe Whyte created a Guide to Video Marketing on Youtube a couple of months ago and has some very good information. One of the things he focuses on is the importance of building your Youtube profile. As with all social sites, the more “friends” and followers you have, the more exposure your posts and comments are going to get - since there are ways of spreading the word to your little community (”sharing”) every time you add something to your profile.

He also suggest you use your friend and contact lists on other sites like Digg, StumbleUpon and Twitter to notify them when you’ve posted a new video.

Joe has done at least two more posts on video marketing on Youtube…

Video Marketing on YouTube.com, and

How to Boost Your YouTube Subscribers : Power of Video Marketing

And this article by Grant Crowell,

Video SEO Expert Interview - Performics Jeremy Clem

There is an excellent list of resources for producing and using online video on Ralph Wilson’s Web Marketing Today. Follow this link: 

Video Marketing Resources

It seems odd to me that Wilson mentions two important web hosting services, but does not mention the free web-hosting services provided by the major video-sharing sites (such as Youtube, Revver, etc.) There’s no doubt that the inclusion of screencast.com is important because if you are doing screen captures - especially using Camtasia - most video sharing sites I have tried do not handle these videos adequately at all.

The reason is that Camtasia uses its own special codec which results in excellent quality video. But when you upload this to a site like Youtube, it gets converted into a different format and is published in a much smaller size. Unless you design your screen capture from the beginning for this smaller size it will be pretty ineffective when Youtube, etc. get through with it.

There is also a list of some pretty good resources for video production, including indepth technical articles at WebVideoUniverse.com and Wilson’s own resource materials found at Video and Audio on Websites.

You can find some more detailed information about video SEO in an article by Onil Gunawardana of Blinkx. The article is called “How to Maximize Search Engine Optimization for Web Video.”

The author puts particular emphasis on the importance of tags for optimization within specific sites - to take advantage of the natural traffic within the site. All sites categorize videos in a variety of ways, and you want to make sure your videos come up in the right lists. Videos also get grouped when they are viewed with others sharing similar subject matter. So there is a visual impetus to click on videos with similar content.

For instance, the author suggests using “category descriptor tags” such as “comedy”, “mystery”, “finance”, “health”, “business” so they come up in internal searches for videos in these areas.

This series of videos describes how to get a video running on your website - right from video creation to where your video should be hosted, to how you embed your video in your site. This is #1 in the series and discusses the pros and cons of self-hosting vs. hosting your video on a video-sharing site like Youtube or Revver.