Posts Tagged ‘Video’
Domain Registration Best Practices – SEO Video Lesson
Tuesday, May 8th, 2012
When you register a new website, always try to register it for at least 10 years. This is important for a few reasons. First off, it shows you long term commitment to the search engines, which will help build trust. Secondly, it ensures that you won’t lose your website should the registration renewal deadline pass without you remembering.
Watch this week’s SEO video lesson from Nick Stamoulis here!
For more Internet marketing lessons from Nick Stamoulis, check out the Brick Marketing Internet marketing video lesson archive.
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Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Journal
Use Broad Keywords to Start Your Keyword Research – SEO Video Tip
Saturday, May 5th, 2012
It’s important when you start your keyword research that your first few keyword lists are created using a broad keyword as the seed. If you start with too long tail or niche of a keyword, you won’t be able to come up with enough viable (and actually searched for!) variations. It’s also important to not let company ego get in the way when conducting keyword research and only use keywords the management likes.
Watch this week’s SEO video lesson here!
For more keyword research lessons from Nick Stamoulis, check out the Brick Marketing keyword research video lesson archive.
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Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Journal
H Tags Help SEO and Improve User Experience – SEO Video Tip
Monday, April 16th, 2012
H tags are like the headlines of your site’s content. They tell readers what that page is about and help break up the content into manageable chunks. Not only are H tags a great place to target your most important keywords and help your SEO, they improve the overall user experience of your website by making it easy for visitors to find the information they are looking for.
Watch this week’s SEO video lesson here!
For more onsite SEO tips and lessons from Nick Stamoulis, check out the Brick Marketing onsite SEO video lesson archive.
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Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Journal
Delivering Your Online PR to the Right Audience – SEO Video Lesson
Tuesday, April 3rd, 2012
While online PR is an excellent source of inbound links, it is also a great way to connect your brand with relevant journalists online. Paid PR distribution sites will let users target specific regions and industries for distribution to ensure that the release is getting sent out to the right audience.
Watch this week’s SEO video lesson here!
For more Internet marketing tips and lessons from Nick Stamoulis, check out the Brick Marketing Internet marketing video lesson archive.
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Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Journal
How Do Social Signals Affect SEO? — SEO Video Lesson
Sunday, April 1st, 2012
Social media marketing and SEO are becoming more and more intertwined as time goes by. The search engines have freely admitted that they look at social signals to influence the SERPs. This means that the more times a piece of content is shared on the social networks the more valuable and trusted it becomes in the eyes of the search engines.
Watch this week’s SEO video lesson here!
For more social media marketing tips and lessons from Nick Stamoulis, check out the Brick Marketing social media marketing video lesson archive.
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Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Journal
Getting Video Results in Google
Wednesday, March 21st, 2012
The following post is a beginner’s Video SEO blueprint. Follow the steps below to ensure that you’re getting video results in both Google Video Search and Google Organic.
1. Target the Right Terms
Certain terms are more likely to yield video results than others. Look for longer tail enquiries currently returning video results or other rich snippets. Don’t expect to get a video result for terms returning a lot of local results or competitive commercial terms.
For example, search terms containing the following words will typically yield video results:
- “tutorial”
- “review”
- “test”
- “what is…”
- “how to…”
- “demonstration”
- “explanation”
2. Secure the Content
Either self-host your videos, or use a third party hosting solution which allows you to control where your videos are visible. I would recommend the following platforms for third party hosting:
If you’re self-hosting, using your own servers or a cloud solution such as Amazon S3 to host your videos is fine.
Do not use YouTube or a standard Vimeo account for your hosting, as the youtube.com or vimeo.com domains will rank for your videos, rather than your own domain.
3. Embed in a Crawlable Player
Ensure you embed your videos in an HTML5 player with flash fallback (or a pure flash player) – not an iframe. All of the major hosting solutions above have this option.
If you are self-hosting, then use a player from the following list of excellent customisable video players, or create your own in HTML5 and jQuery
- JW Player – Paid
- Video JS - Open Source
- Kaltura HTML5 - Open Source
Embed only one video on a page you wish to get a video result. Having multiple videos on a page will mean Googlebot may struggle to pick out an appropriate video to connect with the rich snippets. Equally, duplicate video content can be problematic – for best practice, ensure that each page holds only one, unique video.
4. Surround the Video with Supporting Information
If possible, ensure you have attached a closed caption file to your video player and include a link on the page to a text file with the captioning information in a TTML compatible format like SubRip (.srt). Most of the major video players have a proprietary solution for captioning, but if yours doesn’t, then you can include subtitles on HTML5 video using JavaScript
Alternatively, it’s also fine to include the transcript of the video as body text within the rest of the page.
Images, links and supporting text also help to indicate to the engines that this is a quality page and should be indexed, so make sure your video at least comes with an accompanying text description. A page with only video content on it looks thin algorithmically thin.
Blog posts featuring unique videos are the most common content types to receive video rich snippets.
5. Submit a Video XML Sitemap
A video sitemap is the main way of giving search engines rich meta-data about your video, ensuring that they have access to the thumbnail, raw video file and supporting descriptions of the content.
Once you have created your XML sitemap, ensure the sitemap is added to the robots.txt file and submit it to Google webmaster tools.
Use this template to construct your video sitemap:
The <content_loc> element in the sitemap refers to the location of the actual video file (.mp4 or .flv etc), while the <player_loc> element refers to the location of the HTML5/Flash video player.
Dependent on your hosting solution, sometimes it’s not possible to include both <player_loc> and <content_loc> elements – if you cannot provide both, including just one is fine.
Ensure than the <thumbnail_loc> links to an image file in 16:9 up to a maximum resolution of 1920×1080 px.
Good practice is to ensure that the <video:uploader> element links to a Google+ profile or a blog profile page with rel=”author” attribution.
6. Include the Schema.org Mark-up in the Page’s HTML Code
Schema is another way of giving the search engines some rich meta data about your video. Include as many of the relevant tags as you can, for the best chance of receiving video rich snippets.
If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to get in touch. Good luck!
Phil
Phil Nottingham Phil is an SEO Analyst at Distilled London, where he specialises in video, wacky link-building strategies and complaining about poor design.
Phil Nottingham————–
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distilled
B2B Keyword Research – SEO Video Lesson
Friday, March 16th, 2012
B2B websites have to be sure to include those long tail, niche industry keywords in their B2B keyword research. Even if those keywords don’t have a high search volume, it’s important that your website be positioned well for when someone does search for those B2B keyword phrases. Someone using those highly targeted keywords is most likely your exact target audience.
Watch this week’s SEO video lesson here!
For more keyword research tips and advice, check out the Brick Marketing Keyword Research Video Lesson Archive.
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Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Journal
Video SEO Tactics to Get Ranked
Thursday, March 1st, 2012
Video content should be part of your content strategy if it isn’t already as people really like it and it can be easier to rank video content for competitive keywords than ‘normal’ content when video results are incorporated into the SERP. Tom recently filmed an interview at Grovo on talking about about how important videos will be and encouraged adoption saying that by the end of 2012, if you’re not using video content, you will be behind the curve.
In his post, he shared a few tips like:
- Allowing comments on your YouTube videos as it helps improve rankings
- Make sure your videos have captions
- Include keywords in your file name
Inspired by this, I wanted to share some tips from my experience. If you have other tips, drop a line in the comments ans share!
Don’t Host Your Videos on YouTube
Ok, that’s not always true. YouTube is a good source of getting views for your videos as it is the second largest search engine, but it isn’t always the best place to host your videos. If the keywords you are targeting cause video results to turn up in the search results, then you should not host the video on YouTube, rather, host it on your own site.
An additional consideration is that YouTube views rarely turn into website traffic. If your main goal is to drive more traffic to your website, you should host the video on your own site.
If you want the video on your site instead of YouTube, you don’t have to host yourself. There are many video hosting services out there, like Wistia, that will not only let you embed the video (as YouTube does), but they go further and provide you with a video XML sitemap, attributing ownership of the video to your site.
Video XML Sitemaps
If you want the video on your site rather than YouTube, create a video XML sitemap and submit it in Google Webmaster Tools. This will help Google to discover this content (but it won’t impact your rankings). If you use a service like Wistia, they will generate a video XML sitemap for you that you can submit.
If you want to make your own, here are some things to keep in mind.
There are five basic requirements for a video XML sitemap – you must provide the following for every video:
- Title
- Description
- URL of the play page – the page you want to show up in search results
- URL for the thumbnail you want associated with the video
- URL for the raw file location or the URL for the player location
If you are putting the video on YouTube or Vimeo, you will have to use the URL for the player location rather than the URL of the raw file location. Further, if you are putting your video on YouTube or Vimeo, you should still provide a video sitemap as this will provide more meta data for the video.
Additionally, keep in mind that an XML sitemap can only have 50,000 entries.
There are additional tags that can be included in a sitemap (and you should include as many as possible) – Google provides documentation of these here.
If you are on WordPress, there are a couple plugins you might want to look into:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/xml-sitemaps-for-videos/
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/video-embed-thumbnail-generator/
Keyword Research
Though it seems really basic to state the value in keyword research, it is frequently a process that is overlooked for video content. Here are tools you can use to do some keyword research (though, it may be really rough)
If you are planning on hosting the video on YouTube, look at these tools:
Sometime you can get some good data from this tool, but most of the time it provides a frustrating experience as it is broken most of the time (see screen shots)
Working
Not Working
Even Worse
YouTube Suggest
While this doesn’t really show you how many people are searching for terms, it can help you come up with some ideas.
If you are hosting the video on your site, use your normal keyword research tools.
Once you have determined your keywords, make sure to use them in the:
- Video Title
- File Name
- Video description
- Closed caption/transcript file
- Comments
- Surrounding text (if the video is hosted on your site)
Transcribe Your Videos
As Google can’t determine the content of a video like they can do for a blog post, Google won’t really know the content of the video unless you tell them exactly what’s in it. The solution is to transcribe your videos and put the content below the video.
Exported in HD
Videos that are exported in HD tend to perform better than those that aren’t. YouTube won’t know the difference between a video that is filmed in HD and one that is filmed in SD and simply exported in HD. That in mind, it is really important to make sure it can scale from 1920 x 1080 down to the actual player size.
There could be a lot of factors playing into this but as a best practice, you will want to film (or export) in the highest quality possible. This is true for both videos that you put on YouTube and host yourself.
Manipulate the Embed Code
Sure, you can provide your users with the embed code that Wistia or YouTube gives you. Or you can edit it so that you get a link out of it.
This is the embed code that YouTube gives you: <iframe width=”560″ height=”315″ src=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/4B36Lr0Unp4″ frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen></iframe>
You should edit the embed code that you give your users so that it includes a link back to your site:
<center><p><iframe width=”560″ height=”315″ src=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/4B36Lr0Unp4″ frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen></iframe><br /> Video by <a href=”http://devingraham.blogspot.com/”>Devin Graham</a></p></center>
Which shows up like this:
Video by Devin Graham
You can take it one step further, and provide a text box that automatically selects the text:
<center><h3>Put This Video on Your Site</h3></center><p style=”text-align:center”><textarea rows=”5″ cols=”50″ onclick=”this.focus(); this.select();”><center <iframe width=”560″ height=”315″ src=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/4B36Lr0Unp4″ frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen> <br /> Video by <a href=”http://devingraham.blogspot.com/”>Devin Graham</a></center></textarea></p>
This will give you a nice text box around your embed code:
If you have a fancy Wistia account (super embed) or Vimeo Pro, you can edit the embed code so that it will incorporate any links that you need for your optimization efforts.
Good Headline
Like any link bait that you release, your video should have a good headline. Instead of rephrasing what is already written, I will recommend that you read Magnetic Headlines.
More Resources
If you want to explore the technical details, check out these posts:
A guide to Youtube SEO by David Sottimano
A guide to creating awesome videos for SEO by Phil Nottingham
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distilled
How Can I Track my SEO Rankings? [Video FAQ Series]
Friday, February 10th, 2012
It can be difficult to track the exact position of keywords in Google since a number of things can affect the outcome. Personalized search, local results, and different data centers can all dramatically influence the rankings you see. Google’s algorithm changes more than 200 times a year, so rankings also fluctuate from week to week or day to day. Overall, you should be looking for trends in your rankings.
With that in mind there are numerous tools that can help you track rankings. One way to track rankings is to use filters within Google Analytics. More information about this is available on Yoast’s blog.
This information can also be gathered through Google Webmaster Tools. In your Webmaster tools click on “Your Site on the Web” and then on “Search Queries.” This will give you the average position on Google for your site for a given term.
Paid options also exist that allow you to track very specific terms. Rank Tracker is a paid option that automatically checks your search engine rankings and shows you if your site has moved up or down in the search results. It can also help you discover profitable keywords you may not have considered on your own.
The SEO Moz tool is another good option that will track rankings from Google, Bing and Yahoo in any country. This tool pulls rankings automatically and provides some nice charts to show progress.
Authority Labs in another paid tool that provides fully automated reports, allowing you to track local results, international keywords, and a large volume of keywords.
Advanced Web Ranking and Rank Checker are additional services that can be useful for tracking web rankings.
There are a lot of good ways to track search engine rankings. If you have additional SEO services or tools that you like to use for tracking rankings, feel free to leave a comment.
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SEO.com
What is a Link Farm? [Video FAQ Series]
Saturday, February 4th, 2012
A link farm is a website with a high number of links to different websites with no relevance or category logic, grouping, organization, or relevance to the domain name.
If you land on a site and there are hundreds of links all over with many unrelated topics, you’ve probably landed on a link farm. Link farms ARE spam and will be considered as such by Search Engines. The key purpose of link farms are to easily and illegitimately send signals to search engines to assist in ranking.
A few important things to keep in mind when it comes to link farms:
- If you’re using link farms in any way for your SEO, STOP! It will not serve your clients end goal to rank well and long.
- If you take a client on or have a website where you find your website has somehow been included in a link farm take corrective action to be removed.
- And most of all, remember that SEO is ALL ABOUT RELEVANCE. Links farms are the exact opposite of obtaining the correct relevance signals to rank organically. The best and most legitimate way to build an quality SEO marketing campaign is through legitimate digital marketing initiatives like guest blogging, public relations, high level directory link building (posicionamiento web), internal blogging and user generated content, social media and keeping your business at the forefront of news and minds so that natural links are acquired.
It’s important to do everything you can to diversify your link portfolio and make your links appear as natural as possible. This means having different types of relevant links coming from various different domains and IP addresses.
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SEO.com