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Video Optimization Techniques to Consider

On January 9, 2010, In SEO, by Nick Stamoulis

You’ve decided that now is the time to start including videos on your website. Good for you. To be sure, it is the perfect time. And it’s never too late to get started. But how do you optimize your videos?
Here are three specific methods for video optimization that you should use when implementing your [...]

You’ve decided that now is the time to start including videos on your website. Good for you. To be sure, it is the perfect time. And it’s never too late to get started. But how do you optimize your videos?

Here are three specific methods for video optimization that you should use when implementing your on-site video marketing campaign:

Keyword-rich file name: This is one of the most important video optimization techniques for any website. Don’t just name your video something generic like video1 or video-of-me-and-billy. Instead, give your video a keyword-rich file name. For example, if you sell chocolate truffles on your website and you are adding a video of your manufacturing process, give your video a name like the-chocolate-truffle-making-process.wav. This is a keyword optimize file name that will give you a big search engine optimziation boost in the search engines.

Include a text description: Unlike image optimization, videos don’t use alt tags. However, you can use a text description below or beside the video to give it an additional SEO boost. The description should be 2-3 sentences. And you should use your keyword a couple of times in the description to ensure that the search engines understand what the video is about. For instance, for the chocolate truffle video above, you might say something like “United Chocolate Truffles, Inc. spends 4 hours on each box of chocolate truffles in the manufacturing process. The video above shows our chocolate truffle team at Station 2 (the mixing station) adding our special ingredient, a trade secret that makes our chocolate truffles 30% richer.” Make your video descriptions keyword rich.
Include a share button: If you allow your site visitors an opportunity to share your video with others on their favorite social networks or send the video by e-mail to a friend you’ll increase your traffic to that page dramatically. Increased traffic can lead to higher search engine rankings, particularly if you have a low bounce rate (and if people are watching your video you’ll have a low bounce rate).

Video optimization is not rocket science, but there are some specific techniques that will boost your SEO efforts. These three video optimization techniques are some of the most important that you should know.

Should You Ever Have More Than 5 Clicks To Get To a Page?

On January 8, 2010, In SEO, by rustybrick

Most search engines find new pages by crawling links from other sites. At the same time, the more links to a page and the quality of the pages linking to a page, drives the quality of the page being linked to. These are all basic SEO principles.

This is why many SEOs place links to their most important internal pages, right off of their home page. Why?

(1) They want them indexed faster and typically one’s home page is indexed more often than other pages (not always). So having a link from your most popular page to other pages, help the other pages also get indexed faster.

(2) Also your home page normally has the most amount of links to it, so typically has the higher link equity of all your page (not always), so linking to pages off your home page will funnel some of that high link equity to the pages you are linking to. This may result in a higher ranking for those pages linked to from your home page.

Again, all basic SEO principles.

The myth is having pages based in the root directory of your server results in higher ranking. That is not true, it is all about the click path.

That being said, does it ever make sense to require people to click and click, five or more times to get to an internal page? Since search engines will have to do the same clicking, it might take them longer to find the page and it won’t pass the majority of your home page’s link popularity.

JohnMu, a Googler, in the Google Webmaster Help forums discussed just that in less than a sentence. He said:

I’d have no problem clicking through 5-6 links to get to highly specific content if I needed it and your site had it.

Google knows that there is a logical site hierarchy. Google knows that there are deeper pages on a site that is important. As an SEO, it is not just about linking to them off your home page, but also about getting external links to those pages. And it is also about utilizing your other internal pages to get the search bots to bite them.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

Most search engines find new pages by crawling links from other sites. At the same time, the more links to a page and the quality of the pages linking to a page, drives the quality of the page being linked to. These are all basic SEO principles.

This is why many SEOs place links to their most important internal pages, right off of their home page. Why?

(1) They want them indexed faster and typically one’s home page is indexed more often than other pages (not always). So having a link from your most popular page to other pages, help the other pages also get indexed faster.

(2) Also your home page normally has the most amount of links to it, so typically has the higher link equity of all your page (not always), so linking to pages off your home page will funnel some of that high link equity to the pages you are linking to. This may result in a higher ranking for those pages linked to from your home page.

Again, all basic SEO principles.

The myth is having pages based in the root directory of your server results in higher ranking. That is not true, it is all about the click path.

That being said, does it ever make sense to require people to click and click, five or more times to get to an internal page? Since search engines will have to do the same clicking, it might take them longer to find the page and it won’t pass the majority of your home page’s link popularity.

JohnMu, a Googler, in the Google Webmaster Help forums discussed just that in less than a sentence. He said:

I’d have no problem clicking through 5-6 links to get to highly specific content if I needed it and your site had it.

Google knows that there is a logical site hierarchy. Google knows that there are deeper pages on a site that is important. As an SEO, it is not just about linking to them off your home page, but also about getting external links to those pages. And it is also about utilizing your other internal pages to get the search bots to bite them.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

What Time Is It In Bangladesh? Google & Yahoo Disagree With Bing & Ask

On January 8, 2010, In SEO, by rustybrick

When you ask someone what time is it, you normally don’t have to second guess them. But when it comes to asking Google, Yahoo, Bing or Ask.com what time is it, you have to second guess them.

If you search [bangladesh time] at the four search engines, you will have Google and Yahoo telling you one time, while Bing.com and Ask.com telling you a different time. Who do you believe?

Google & Yahoo:

Bing & Ask.com:

So who is right?

Forum discussion at Google Web Search Help.

When you ask someone what time is it, you normally don’t have to second guess them. But when it comes to asking Google, Yahoo, Bing or Ask.com what time is it, you have to second guess them.

If you search [bangladesh time] at the four search engines, you will have Google and Yahoo telling you one time, while Bing.com and Ask.com telling you a different time. Who do you believe?

Google & Yahoo:

Bing & Ask.com:

So who is right?

Forum discussion at Google Web Search Help.

Link Building Sources That Are Important

On January 8, 2010, In SEO, by Nick Stamoulis

Everyone keeps telling us links are very important for our ongoing search engine optimization efforts. Some of these types of inbound links are obvious but some are not so obvious and could still generate both power and visitors to your website. It is important to understand all the variety of different types of relevant [...]

Everyone keeps telling us links are very important for our ongoing search engine optimization efforts. Some of these types of inbound links are obvious but some are not so obvious and could still generate both power and visitors to your website. It is important to understand all the variety of different types of relevant links that you are capable of achieving over time.

Here are some of the most important types of links to build to your website:

1. Press Releases: Press releases are a very important ingredient to any online marketing campaign. Links embedded into the press release can generate very useful links for your website from other industry related sites. If it is a really newsworthy topic and other websites pick up the information it will be even more beneficial in generating new pathways to your website.

2. Articles: Articles used to have a bit more weight to them but they are still very important. The right types of articles could very easily get picked up on other industry leading websites leading to very good links and a steady stream of highly targeted website traffic.

3. Profiles: Website profiles usually only give you one link but that one link is a very important link. Whether it is from Facebook or LinkedIn the links let the search engines know that you are serious about growing your business in many different areas online.

4. Forums: Most forums are very old so the links you could get from them will help your business in a great way. Not to mention the traffic you could generate from being active in a forum is sometimes very surprising. Many of the older forums have a great deal of activity and if it’s a forum dedicated towards your industry than you should be there regardless.

5. Local Profiles: Don’t think because you want to take your business international that listing yourself in the local places and directories isn’t important. The links will let the search engines know that you have a physical address connected with your business helping grow your trust factor.

6. Blog Comments: Leaving intelligent related comments behind on your targeted industry blogs is very helpful. Many of the links appear in Google webmaster tools all while driving highly relevant traffic to your website.

6. Industry Associations: Local online and offline industry associations are a great way to build trust with your website visitors. Often many times association memberships include the opportunity to have profiles and links to your website. This not only helps with link building but builds highly relevant visitors to your website.

These are some of the most important link sources you should have as part of your long term link building efforts. Remember it is important to diversify your approach so you never want to be top heavy on any of these efforts. Keeping your links balanced and growing is the name of the game.

Jill Whalen Takes a Look at 10 Past Years of SEO

On January 7, 2010, In SEO, by rustybrick

I love it when you have the old geezers (in the SEO world, that means 10 years old), take a look in the past at how the industry has evolved. Danny Sullivan has done it and so have others. I personally have only been covering search for over six years, but I have been involved in the web development since I was 16, which was in 1996 (yea, I turn 30 this year).

In any event, Jill Whalen posted her A Decade of 21st Century SEO. She goes through each year, starting in 2000, and pulls out her notes of SEO thoughts and best quotes for that year. I cannot summarize them all, and although it is 10 years long, it is a quick and fun read. So make sure to check it out.

There is a Sphinn thread on the topic as well. Danny Sullivan let the cat out of the bag that his decade in search post will be out over the weekend. He is currently up to 2007.

I’ll just end this post with a quote from her ending remarks:

It’s important to note that my ideal of SEO even before the year 2000 has always assumed that search engines will someday be perfect. Through the years, Google has given credence to my mantra during the times when they haven’t allowed the crap-hat SEO stuff to work. By the same token, they have also made me look silly at the times when it does still work. My hope is that Google (or any other search engine) never gives up trying to find the best, most relevant results for their users – the searchers – because my SEO methods are based on that ideal.

There are only a few in this industry who have stood up, given themselves to the community for as long as she has. I won’t name them all, but Jill deserves huge credit for not just practicing SEO for over 10 years, but for being involved in the industry, actively, every day, for the past 10 years plus. You can’t say that about many people in the industry.

Thank you Jill.

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

I love it when you have the old geezers (in the SEO world, that means 10 years old), take a look in the past at how the industry has evolved. Danny Sullivan has done it and so have others. I personally have only been covering search for over six years, but I have been involved in the web development since I was 16, which was in 1996 (yea, I turn 30 this year).

In any event, Jill Whalen posted her A Decade of 21st Century SEO. She goes through each year, starting in 2000, and pulls out her notes of SEO thoughts and best quotes for that year. I cannot summarize them all, and although it is 10 years long, it is a quick and fun read. So make sure to check it out.

There is a Sphinn thread on the topic as well. Danny Sullivan let the cat out of the bag that his decade in search post will be out over the weekend. He is currently up to 2007.

I’ll just end this post with a quote from her ending remarks:

It’s important to note that my ideal of SEO even before the year 2000 has always assumed that search engines will someday be perfect. Through the years, Google has given credence to my mantra during the times when they haven’t allowed the crap-hat SEO stuff to work. By the same token, they have also made me look silly at the times when it does still work. My hope is that Google (or any other search engine) never gives up trying to find the best, most relevant results for their users – the searchers – because my SEO methods are based on that ideal.

There are only a few in this industry who have stood up, given themselves to the community for as long as she has. I won’t name them all, but Jill deserves huge credit for not just practicing SEO for over 10 years, but for being involved in the industry, actively, every day, for the past 10 years plus. You can’t say that about many people in the industry.

Thank you Jill.

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

Don’t Forget to Market Your Blog

On January 7, 2010, In SEO, by Nick Stamoulis

People blog for different reasons. Some people have an idea for a blog and they want to turn that idea into a real moneymaker. There have been real successful bloggers who have done this, but most attempts that I have encountered have failed. They had an idea and turned their blog into a business model. [...]

People blog for different reasons. Some people have an idea for a blog and they want to turn that idea into a real moneymaker. There have been real successful bloggers who have done this, but most attempts that I have encountered have failed. They had an idea and turned their blog into a business model. Nothing at all wrong with that. How you can tell if a blog has failed is if you see it ranking well in the search engines and have not seen any new posts for months. I can’t tell you how many blogs I have seen, really great ones that get abandoned due to lack of advertisers or poor monetization strategy…that is another blog post topic all together. Others have taken a blog and used it as a marketing tool for a business. Is there a different strategy involved?

Yes. A blog as a business model is different than a blog as a marketing-tool model. But, in reality, both types of blogs require a marketing strategy all to themselves. The key is to drive targeted visitors to your blog from many different sources and which ever type of blog you have – business or marketing tool – you’ll need to market the blog. People often forget that a blog (especially a stand alone one) is a website that needs to be marketed.

There are a variety of ways to market a blog, but it all starts with the blog itself. The most basic form on online marketing is search engine optimization. This is the beginning. By optimizing your blog for search engine traffic you are giving your blog the basic building blocks to act as a business on its own or be used as a marketing tool for your existing business. In some cases, you can even do both. Without a solid SEO strategy for your blog, however, success as either will inevitably allude you. Don’t forget to SEO your blog.

Search engine optimziation is one really good source for targeted visitors however there are many other great ways to drive targeted visitors to your blog, they include:

1. Search Engine Optimization – Make sure your blog has excellent content and is naturally optimized.
2. Online Publicity – Publish newsworthy press releases online to drive relevant visitors and good inbound links.
3. Social Networking – Become active in the top social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter and talk about your blog.
4. Social Bookmarking – Submit your blog posts to good social bookmarking sites such as Digg and StumbleUpon.
5. Guest Blog Writing (on other blogs) - Over time develop your credibility in your niche and write for other related blogs.
6. Opt-In Email Marketing – Build a list through your blog and send out newsletters that drive people back to your blog.

The bottom line is blogging is a useful and long term approach that really works. If you are launching a business as a blog or using your blog to market your business, either way take the time to develop a long term marketing strategy. Believe me, it will be worth your time!

What Great Content Really Means

On January 6, 2010, In SEO, by Nick Stamoulis

You’ve heard the entire search engine optimziation world repeatedly talk about how you need to create compelling or “great” visitor focused content. We all have heard many times that once you have great content then you will magically make you a lot of money or boost your search engine rankings like a magic carpet [...]

You’ve heard the entire search engine optimziation world repeatedly talk about how you need to create compelling or “great” visitor focused content. We all have heard many times that once you have great content then you will magically make you a lot of money or boost your search engine rankings like a magic carpet ride. Well, there may not be any magic involved, but you should always produce the best possible content for every page of your website. If you spend the time writing (or hiring a great content copywriter) content for every page of your website, generally speaking it can help your website achieve great results.

These results are not only from the search engines but having great content on your website helps in several key ways, including the following:

Great content helps deliver your message to the audiences of your website.
Great content (with excellent call to action) helps generate your conversion (leads, sales, etc).
Great content keeps people on your website as long as possible.
Great content keeps them coming back.
Oh yeah, great content can be naturally optimized to generate the right type of targeted visitors from the search engines to your site.

Keeping clients coming back does not necessarily mean to your website, but it does mean to your business. Once you’ve sold them you’ve just got to keep them and that means good customer service (that’s a different blog post). Keeping people on your site means closing the sale. But you have to keep them long enough to make your case (or sales pitch) by having great call to actions on your website.

Another question that I always get asked is, how much content do I need on each page of my website? The answer to that question as far as I am concerned is quality over quantity is the best policy. If it takes 200 words to accomplish your goals and deliver the message on a particular page then so be it. If it takes 100 words of great content to describe a product, then that works too. Be in tune with your audience and understand what is too much or too little content.

Great content is no magic trick. It’s just good copywriting. If you can’t do it yourself, hire someone who can!

Duplicate Content 101

On January 3, 2010, In SEO, by Search Engine Watch

What duplicate content is, how search engines deal with it, and how to avoid the pitfalls. …

Dispelling a Persistent Rel Canonical Myth

On January 3, 2010, In SEO, by randfish

Posted by randfish

Lately I’ve been surprised to hear concerns from a number of SEOs that using the canonical URL tag on the canonical version of the page can somehow cause problems. When I’ve talked to folks about it, there seems to be confusion that only duplicates should use the rel="canonical" specification and the original must remain rel="canonical"-free. This isn’t the case.

Let’s look at a few diagrams to help explain:

This is the standard way rel=canonical is employed. Different versions of a page, whether on your own site, on partner sites, or places you’re licensing content (note: this is an update Google launched on Dec. 17th, 2009) can all reference back to the original to help tell the search engines where to find that piece. However, it’s also perfectly OK to do this:

Looking through Google’s blog post on the subject, this isn’t explicitly stated. However, you can see that even the example website, Wikia, employs this practice on the page Google points out. You can also see Googler Maile Ohye answering a comment on this:

@Wade: Yes, it’s absolutely okay to have a self-referential rel="canonical". It won’t harm the system and additionally, by including a self-reference you better ensure that your mirrors have a rel=”canonical” to you.

Maile’s got really good advice here. If you run into situations where third parties are referencing your posts and appending strings of data to the URL, it can be really helpful to have the canonical URL tag on these by default. In fact, we’ve worked with many companies recently who found it helpful to employ sitewide as a best practice, just to prevent future iterations or less SEO savvy development from reproducing versions of the page that didn’t contain the rel=canonical and potentially losing link juice / causing canonicalization issues.

One last piece – it’s a really, really good way to make sure Google indexes the http rather than https version of your page (and counts link juice to the proper one). This had historically been a royal pain in the butt for many SEOs, and we’ve heard enough positive stories now to feel confident recommending it.

Welcome to 2010! Hope everyone had a great holiday break

Do you like this post? Yes No

Posted by randfish

Lately I’ve been surprised to hear concerns from a number of SEOs that using the canonical URL tag on the canonical version of the page can somehow cause problems. When I’ve talked to folks about it, there seems to be confusion that only duplicates should use the rel="canonical" specification and the original must remain rel="canonical"-free. This isn’t the case.

Let’s look at a few diagrams to help explain:

This is the standard way rel=canonical is employed. Different versions of a page, whether on your own site, on partner sites, or places you’re licensing content (note: this is an update Google launched on Dec. 17th, 2009) can all reference back to the original to help tell the search engines where to find that piece. However, it’s also perfectly OK to do this:

Looking through Google’s blog post on the subject, this isn’t explicitly stated. However, you can see that even the example website, Wikia, employs this practice on the page Google points out. You can also see Googler Maile Ohye answering a comment on this:

@Wade: Yes, it’s absolutely okay to have a self-referential rel="canonical". It won’t harm the system and additionally, by including a self-reference you better ensure that your mirrors have a rel=”canonical” to you.

Maile’s got really good advice here. If you run into situations where third parties are referencing your posts and appending strings of data to the URL, it can be really helpful to have the canonical URL tag on these by default. In fact, we’ve worked with many companies recently who found it helpful to employ sitewide as a best practice, just to prevent future iterations or less SEO savvy development from reproducing versions of the page that didn’t contain the rel=canonical and potentially losing link juice / causing canonicalization issues.

One last piece – it’s a really, really good way to make sure Google indexes the http rather than https version of your page (and counts link juice to the proper one). This had historically been a royal pain in the butt for many SEOs, and we’ve heard enough positive stories now to feel confident recommending it.

Welcome to 2010! Hope everyone had a great holiday break

Do you like this post? Yes No

Should You Purchase Other TLDs?

On December 29, 2009, In SEO, by Nick Stamoulis

Your domain name is very important. It is a brandable item and should be used with great care and forethought. Your domain name should align directly with your company and business goals. It is used more than for search engine optimization, it is your entire brand online. There are times when you might [...]

Your domain name is very important. It is a brandable item and should be used with great care and forethought. Your domain name should align directly with your company and business goals. It is used more than for search engine optimization, it is your entire brand online. There are times when you might want to purchase domain names that cross over into multiple TLDs and then there are times when you shouldn’t bother.

Let’s say that you are starting a new business in the UK and you purchase the domain name newbusiness.com. Should you also purchase newbusiness.co.uk?

There are plenty of reasons why you should. If you know that your business will operate primarily in the UK then having the regional TLD will benefit you. You could redirect one of the domains to the other or build two websites and increase your chances of ranking in the search engines for your search terms – just don’t use duplicate content!

The dot com TLD has a lot of potential to rank worldwide for your search terms, but it may be easier to go for the regional rankings instead. In fact, one strategy is to build two sites – one that targets your region and the other that is focused globally. When you start to rank in your local region for your important keywords then you can take advantage of those rankings by capitalizing on them. When your business grows to an extent that the business you get from outside your region matches that from within your region then you can redirect your regional TLD to the dot com site and keep on trucking.

That’s just one strategy. Here’s another:

You are starting a business in the U.S. that will have a global outreach, but you know your business will remain a small business forever. Should you snag up every newbusiness dot TLD on the planet? Probably not. That could get costly. But a multinational corporation with a presence on every continent might want to do just that.

What’s the moral? Analyze your business goals. If you are a regional business that you see may expand into a global outreach some day, buy up the dot com and the regional TLD for your site’s name and focus on regional sales until you deem it is prudent to go global. If you are starting out globally but staying small then don’t bother with regional TLDs unless you think you may run into copyright or trademark issues.

Should You Ever Have More Than 5 Clicks To Get To a Page?

What Time Is It In Bangladesh? Google & Yahoo Disagree With Bing & Ask

Link Building Sources That Are Important

Jill Whalen Takes a Look at 10 Past Years of SEO

Don’t Forget to Market Your Blog

What Great Content Really Means

Duplicate Content 101

Dispelling a Persistent Rel Canonical Myth

Should You Purchase Other TLDs?

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