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SEO For Videos: Why Google Loves a Search Engine Optimized Video

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The upper echelons of the Google search results are being invaded by a newcomer; the search engine optimized video.

But search engine optimization is all about coding and writing text, surely? Real SEO is stuff like keywords, language, semantically structured information, well-aged domains with buckets of trusted incoming links and well-written authoritative content?

Well, it is true that the vast majority of currently indexed web content is text-based, and that those trillions of web pages contain an equally mind-boggling number of images. This huge amount of ‘traditional’ web content has been growing exponentially since the early days of the internet, and the challenge of ranking highly amongst it is directly proportional to that growth. Any new or even temporary way to rise to the top of the pile is therefore more than welcome. Right now, optimizing your video files –VSEO -can be a shortcut to page one. [Read more…] about SEO For Videos: Why Google Loves a Search Engine Optimized Video

The Secret to Boosting Search Traffic By Being Fast and Easy

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Did you know that sites which load quickly get higher search engine keyword rankings thereby getting more search traffic to their sites than slow-loading sites?  It’s true for your blog, too.  Even Google has admitted that fast load times equate to higher search rankings.  However, most bloggers haven’t taken the time to evaluate their blogs’ load times.

The more “stuff” you put on any given page on your blog, such as flash effects, ads, images, videos, and all the other stuff that clutters bloggers’ sidebars, the slower your blog posts and pages will load on a visitor’s web browser.  Fortunately, there are ways to both analyze your blog’s load time on an ongoing basis and there are ways to speed up page load time across your blog.

Out with the Old

First, take a look through the content on your blog.  Are there flash items, images, video or other content that slows down the page load time that you can remove entirely?  Common culprits for slow-loading pages are flash elements and third-party ads.  Each element on a page on your blog or website has to be “called up” and displayed on screen each time that page loads.  No one wants to hang out and wait for a page to load for more than a couple of seconds.  That’s simply the way that web browsing works in 2010.  People expect pages to load instantly.  If they have to wait more than a few seconds, they’ll click away never to return again.

In with the New

Second, use a tool like Google Webmaster Central to keep track of page load time on your blog.  Using the Site Performance option in Google Webmaster Central can give you all kinds of information about your blog page load time, so you can make changes to pages that are loading particularly slowly.

Add a Little Something Extra

Third, if you use WordPress, use a plugin like W3 Total Cache to speed up page load time on your blog.  You can follow the link to read more about WordPress plugins to reduce load time.  You also should read about 9 easy steps to speed up your WordPress blog.

Bottom-line

Page load time can help or hurt the organic traffic that comes to your blog from keyword searches.  What are you waiting for?  If you want to get more search traffic to your blog, then you should take some time to find ways to make sure your content loads quickly so Google gives it the highest ranking possible.

Image: stock.xchng

The Benefits of Splitting Off Into Microsites

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Are two blogs and/or websites better than one?

Many website owners, as their businesses expand, come to the dilemma of splitting their sites into a few microsites so they can rank better for their targeted terms. This is not really an easy topic and before you make such a radical move there is a lot to take into consideration.

Reasons to Split a Site Into Microsites

1. Your brand name is not doing very well and you would like a part of the business to be re-branded and market it separately.

2. Your businesses are expanding into a few different niches, thus the one site you have can’t really serve all those different businesses.

3. You think that by splitting your site into several smaller ones you will manage to engage the visitors interested in a particular service or product. Conversion may increase as users will think that they are at a specialist’s website rather than a generic one offering all sorts of services or products.

Risks and Dangers

There are certain risks you will be taking by making such a big change and you need to think carefully before you make any decision. [Read more…] about The Benefits of Splitting Off Into Microsites

The Complete Guide to Search Engine Optimization and Social Media Marketing

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Search Engine Optimization often is a difficult topic and not every blogger agrees that much time should be spend at it but too often people discussing the topic do not know what it all entails. So we sat down and created a What is SEO? infographic.

The graphic covers all basics of SEO and explains the different components of search engine optimisation: link infrastructure, keywords, social media campaigns, PPC and linkbait.

[Read more…] about The Complete Guide to Search Engine Optimization and Social Media Marketing

How to Help Your Guest Authors in Their SEO Efforts

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Help Guest Authors in their SEO Efforts

The blog SEO is nothing to go mad about: essentially there are just a few tweaks needed to make sure the blog post is search-friendly enough to go live. A couple of weeks ago I shared a blog post SEO checklist – it only has 5 points in it – but if you frequently feature guest posts on your blog, it is a smart idea to engage your authors into the optimization process.

You don’t have to spend time teaching each of your new authors SEO specifics of your blog. What you need to do is to fine-tune the process once and you will notice your guest bloggers get enrolled eagerly.

1. Create a Well-Outlined SEO Basics Cheat Sheet

You blog SEO basics list shouldn’t be anything too theoretic. Just outline what you have to deal with each time you are writing or publishing a post.

What I would recommend creating is a one-page well-organized outline in PDF listing your blog SEO specifics:

  • Your recommendations as to (sub)heading usage. Note, that h2 and h3 tags make your posts easier to scan; they also make your keywords more prominent.
  • Your advice on using the keywords in the article copy: which tools do you use to research keywords? How do you make your copy richer (by using synonyms, keyword suggestions, etc);
  • Your image optimization tactics: what I usually mention here is that:
    • The images should be no larger than 100K
    • The images should always have the ALT attribute – not just the TITLE tag like the standard WordPress editor would prompt you to.
    • You can also mention your hotlinking preferences (Would you like the images to be hosted on your blog? – which is usually preferable. Which free image hosting services would you recommend – I usually tend to stick to Flickr).
  • Your internal linking requirements: make it a rule that your guest authors always link (from within the article body) to a few related posts that were previously published at your blog. Let them know the best ways to find those related posts (I for one use SITE:yourdomain.com search for that).
  • Any of the SEO plugins you are using and how to apply them at the post editor level.

2. Install Some SEO WordPress Plugins

These are not actually plenty. Just a few WordPress plugins will help your authors optimize their posts:

1. Either Headspace2 or All in One SEO Pack: the choice is up to you. What’s good about both of them is that they allow to provide custom title tag, meta description and keywords – right at the post editor page:

Guest SEO: All-in-One SEO Pack

2. Insights: This plugin makes it easy to search for the related posts right from the blog editor page and also instantly link the words right from the editor:

Insights: Guest author

3. SEO Smart Links: automatic interlinking. This plugin interlinks your blog content automatically. It is rich in settings and options – so you can configure it in plenty of ways:

  • Set what to interlink (posts, pages, categories and/or tags);
  • Ignore words in links (like “about”, “contact”);
  • Set the maximum number of links;

SEO smart links

3. Equip Your Guest Bloggers with Essential Tools

Many huge multi-author blog owners prefer to buy a corporate licence of some useful SEO tools and give access to all their (guest) authors. This section looks at some free tools instead. Include the links to those tools in your SEO tutorial (see #1) and make sure your authors are using those:

1. SEO Blogger: This tool is the FireFox addon that lets the user research the related phrases in the browser sidebar. You can thus research the keywords without having to leave the blog post editor: write and format your post while researching your keywords.

SEO blogger

2. Copyright Checker. There are actually quite a few plagiarism checkers out there (Copyscape is the most famous but paid one). This one is free and easy to use. Your authors can copy-paste their post text and run it to make sure their content is totally unique.

3. SEO Analysis Tool: Suggest your authors run the tool immediately after the post is published. The tool is great at reporting prominent keywords in:

  • Link text;
  • Image alt attributes;
  • Heading and phrase elements.

This way the bloggers may quickly estimate if they are on the right path:

Keywords Found in the Anchor Tags

Relying on guest blogging and user-generated content to let your resource grow is a great tactic. The only thing is that at least some effort is required to put your readers on the right path. Do you help your guest bloggers to optimize their content?

How the Compounding Effect of Blogging Gives Your Blog a Huge Boost

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The compounding effect of blogging is a topic I often discuss in my books, to my clients, and at speaking engagements, but in order to understand the compounding effect of blogging, you have to understand the importance of search engines in sending visitors to your blog.

Consider this…

Where do you go to find information about just about anything when you need it? Do you check the Yellow Pages? Nope. Do you go to the library and look at an encyclopedia?  Not anymore.  Today, most people have access to the Internet and they turn to Google or their favorite search engine (with Google being #1) to find the information they need on just about any subject.

Example — Imagine you have a website and you want to increase traffic to it.  Here’s how the compounding effect of blogging works:

  1. You have a website made up of 20 pages. That’s 20 entry points to your website for Google to find, index, and deliver in relevant keyword searches.
  2. You add a blog to your website, and you publish a blog post everyday for a year. Now you have 365+20=385 entry points to your website for Google to find, index, and deliver in relevant keyword searches.
  3. You publish posts on your blog and those posts offer interesting, useful, helpful or entertaining content that your audience finds value in. In other words, those posts are shareworthy.
  4. People find your blog content and realize it’s interesting and shareworthy. They share it on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Digg, StumbleUpon, etc. with links back to your blog. They write about it on their own blogs with links back to your blog. Now, the number of entry points to your website (via your blog) has increased exponentially. Your Google search traffic increases as all of these additional incoming links to your blog and website boost your Google search rankings, and traffic to your site from referrers across the web increases, too!
  5. Your website went from a static destination with 20 standard entry points to an interactive, engaging site with hundreds or thousands (or more) of entry points and an increase in traffic from search engines and referrers! You can’t buy that kind of exposure and growth potential!

The compounding effect of blogging really is that simple. It’s about creating shareworthy content and entry points, and it’s a method of building organic search traffic that has a good chance of turning into a long-term, sustainable traffic-stream and help you build a loyal audience.

Bottom-line: any blogger can benefit from the compounding effect of blogging, but it starts with creating shareworthy content.

Image: stock.xchng

Blog marketing: Do social networks outrank search engines?

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An interesting article over at Promotion World declares why search engine traffic is not vital to blogs, outlining the strategies bloggers should already be using to drive traffic and, eventually, loyal readers to their blog.

At first I jumped to a conclusion, thinking that the author (TJ Philpott) was saying that search engine ranking and traffic is not important at all.

In fact, that’s not what’s being said — more that SEO (search engine optimisation) and ranking in itself isn’t a necessity for a successful blog.

This should be music to the ears of most bloggers — in fact, any web site publisher — because anyone who has been publishing online for even a modest amount of time knows how fickle search engines can be. One day, you’re riding high on Google, the next you’ve been mysteriously dropped (you probably didn’t do anything wrong, either).

It’s probably fair to say that most passing traffic comes to blogs from search engines — and the majority of that from Google — but the article suggests that spending a bit more time focusing on social networks and social media can pay real dividends.

It does depend to a certain extent on the purpose of your blog, of course.

If you’re merely trying to get footfall in order to increase revenue from advertising, then search engine ranking equals better traffic and more profit.

If, however, you want to build reader loyalty and sense of community (and in turn, perhaps, sell via affiliate marketing, which tends to do better once a level of reader trust has been built up) then SEO may not be enough.

Inbound links from other blogs certainly help, but they can be hard to achieve.

The article suggests that using social media to encourage visitors to your site may not only increase repeat visitors, but can give you a better insight into what readers actually want as you “socialise” on these sites.

It’s interesting food for thought, but the main take-home point for me is that, like income, diversification of visitor sources is vital for the success of most blogs.

I personally don’t think one type of marketing is better than the other, but both should be used in balance to bring visitors to your blog.

What do you think? Are you switching more towards social media marketing, or is SEO still very important?