Month: September 2015

As a website owner, it is important to recognize that online videos can truly push your website’s search engine optimization (SEO) success to the next level. There are simple steps that you can take to secure higher search engine rankings for Vimeo, DailyMotion, MetaCafe, and YouTube. Video SEO will help you get your message in front of more search engine users, resulting in more customer conversions via your brand’s website.

What Does Video SEO Involve?

YouTube considers several elements when it judges how it will rank your video. These elements include:

• How long you can hold your audience.
• How many people subscribe to your channel.
• The number of video comments, likes or dislikes your video acquires.
• Your use video tags, titles and descriptions.

In order to produce a video that has the potential to go viral, you need to ensure that your video content is entertaining, useful, educational, inspirational, and-or shocking. It should grab a user’s attention and motivate them to watch more of your videos.

In order to keep your viewer engaged, it is recommended that you post videos that are no longer than five minutes in length. In fact, the most common length of YouTube’s most popular videos is three minutes. Remember, your goal is to encourage viewers to watch the whole video. Keep in mind that with the abundant amount of information online, the attention span of a given user is most likely very limited.

Video SEO Tips:

Page title. It is crucial that both your title and your thumbnails are related to the keyword / phrase associated with your video. If your video ranks well on YouTube, it will no doubt rank well on Google.

Let’s say that you have posted a funny video of your cat (after all, ‘pet’ videos are extremely popular online). Your title is: “Jeffery the Cat Plays Hopscotch.” Although this video title explains what is in the video, users will most likely search for “cat” and “Hopscotch” in the same query.

You goal is going to be to write a title that is relevant, but will have words that people are likely to search for. In the case above, you would have a better chance of acquiring viewers if your video was titled “Cute Cat Acts Like A Person Playing Hopscotch.” Why? It is because this title has the phrases “cute cats” and “acts like a person.” These two phrases are searched for much more often than “Jeffery the Cat” or “Cat Plays Hopscotch”. Of course, your title must not be misleading; it must be relevant to the subject matter yet optimized for popular search queries.

Let’s apply this to business and pretend that you run a car cleaning service in Minneapolis. You have created a YouTube video to promote your company. Your instinct might be to make a “catchy” title such as “Wow! You Can Have a Squeaky Clean Car in Minutes.” While this title is certainly inviting, it will not help you appear in many relevant searches.

In order to improve the visibility of your car cleaning service, you should be more specific in regards to your service and your location. Your video would obtain a wider audience if you titled it, “Minneapolis Car Cleaning Service.” Although this video title may not be as glitzy, YouTube and Google will give it priority and it will be easier for Minneapolis users to find. This is because the video contains keywords that Minneapolis residents will actually use when looking for a local car cleaning service. If you would like to get creative, you could blend your advertisement with education. You could create a series of educational videos, such as “5 Car Care Tips From Sam’s Minneapolis Car Cleaning Service.”

Video thumbnails allow users to view a short snapshot of your video. Make sure that the image use is captivating and visually appealing in order to interest the user’s attention.

Video descriptions. Your video description should be very in depth and contain links back to your site. You are responsible for informing search engines what your video is about. You have 980 words to describe your video. Associations have been found between video length and how well it ranks. Our advice: use as many words as you can to create your relevant description. If you run a business, include your company name, address and phone number.

Video tags. YouTube offers many video tag options. You are allowed 500 characters. Do not misuse the tags that YouTube provides you. Make sure that they are relevant to what you offer in the video.

Call-to-action. A call-to-action is a well-defined action that you want your viewers to complete. YouTube allows its users to add a call-to-action button within the video. In order to obtain customers or build you followers, you should always include this button.

When you implement an organic search engine optimization (SEO) campaign, you are employing strategies in order to secure a high ranking on a major search engine results page. These placements are not obtained by paying Google, Yahoo! or Bing. They are obtained by utilizing certain techniques that adhere to the search engine’s algorithm.

Organic SEO techniques include pursuing specific keywords related to your business, adding quality content to your site and obtaining backlinks from authoritative websites.

Websites that devote resources to organic SEO have a much better chance of securing a high placement for given search queries. For example, if your company or organization provides IT services and you utilize organic SEO strategies, you have a strong chance of appearing above your competition when a Google user searches for “IT Services.”

What Are The Benefits Of Organic SEO?

The benefits of organic SEO include:

• Organic SEO = more clicks / more traffic to your website.
• Organic SEO results in longer – even permanent – placement on a given search engine’s top listings.
• Organic SEO strengthens your brand’s reputation.
• Organic SEO is very cost-efficient when compared to paid advertising.

Performing organic SEO can be a very tedious and long process. It is not a one-time endeavor. It requires consistent and endless work. When you stop implementing SEO, your online visibility will diminish. However, you get from it what you put into it and if it is done correctly, you can experience permanent benefits.

Properly-applied organic SEO will lead to higher placements on the major search engines and increased traffic to your website. By using SEO, you have the chance to avoid spending your money on expensive advertising campaigns. Securing first-page placement on Google means that Google will continuously advertise your site on your behalf.

What Are The Strategies Used To Improve Organic SEO?

The results that a search engine presents to its user reflects its ability to deliver quality content. For example, if you are searching for IT services, Google will show you what it perceives as the best IT services-related websites. If Google consistently showed low-quality websites in its results, its users would begin using a different search engine. SEO is the practice of convincing Google that your website is trustworthy and offers useful, high-quality content.

Search engines use several key factors when they consider a website’s placement. The primary factor is how relevant a website’s content is to the subject matter it claims to focus on. If the home page header on your website says “Landscaping” but you provide IT services, it is unlikely that Google will promote your brand.

To perform organic SEO correctly, your site’s content must be relevant for what a user is searching for. Organic SEO is accomplished by:

• Featuring well-written, high quality and informative copy on your site.
• Writing abundant copy on your site (the more copy you feature, the more search queries you will rank for).
• Having a good link structure.
• Applying technical SEO tactics, such as meta tag placement and increasing your site load speed.
• Obtaining quality backlinks to your site.

If you study organic SEO, you will no doubt run into the term black hat SEO. Black hat SEO refers to aggressive and sometimes dishonest tactics that webmasters use to boost their website’s ranking. By using black hat SEO strategies, you are concentrating solely on satisfying the search engine and not your human visitors.

Examples of black hat SEO techniques include:

• Overusing the keyword you wish to rank for (otherwise known as keyword stuffing).
• Using hidden links.
• Duplicating or even stealing content from another user (or from your own website).
• Buying links from low-quality websites.

Although black hat SEO techniques can increase a website’s search engine placement for a short period of time, they usually result in an eventual drop in rankings. In fact, the overuse of black hat SEO can result in your website being banned from a search engine altogether. In addition, a website that uses black hat SEO techniques will usually not appeal to its visitors and will have a harder time converting potential clients.

If you would like to learn more about how organic SEO can benefit your website, please contact the SEO professionals at DigitalParc by calling 612-845-5590 or by emailing hello@digitalparc.com.

You have started a business. It is nothing massive, but you are finally realizing your dreams of owning your own time and throwing your energy into something you are passionate about. While many small business owners are thrilled by what seems like the opportunity to be free from the corporate structure, it is crucial to remember that within the current structure of information and communication networks, small business players will always be operating within a matrix drawn by large business players.

 

While it may seem that this point is irrelevant to small businesses that are not competing with large corporations, understanding the ramifications of this insight is key to establishing a viable business in its early stages.

 

Think about it like an ecosystem: biologists have pointed out that certain natural systems come to dominate ecologically by reaching “tipping points” after which the system’s dominance comes to be self-reinforcing. Biologists call this phenomena positive feedback. Many changes in ecosystems appear to be sudden because of positive feedback. When part of a system increases, another part of the system changes in a way that makes the first part increase even more.

 

Put most simply, success makes it easier to continue succeeding, and creates systems in which successful entities become massively dominant. The same dynamic can be seen in almost any competitive system. Take your iTunes “25 Most Played Songs” playlist. While songs may reach that playlist by virtue of being played only a few more times than other songs, once they reach the playlist, they tend to stay there. Every time you play the Top 25 playlist, the songs are played again, increasing the total number of plays and ensuring that the top songs stay on the top.

 

Search engine results function in precisely this way, through positive feedback loops. Certain links get more clicks, resulting in higher search ranking, resulting in more clicks.

 

Success creates success. As a result, no matter how innovative your new business idea may be, it will inevitably “go extinct” unless you come up with strategies to break the positive feedback loop of Internet search results.

 

Think about SEO consultants as trained web ecologists – they know the detailed mechanics that can be manipulated to prioritize your web site in search results, and can help break market dominance by disrupting the success-creates-success loops. More importantly, SEO consultants can give your business the push to create your own self-reinforcing positive feedback loop.