youtube

First off, try to use your company name as your username on YouTube. If you discover someone is already using that name check around the office to see if anyone set that account up, if no one comes clean you can actually request the account from YouTube. Check how long it has been since they have logged on. If it is over six months, you have a good case, considering that is your domain name. Same goes for Twitter.

Even if you can’t get your company name on YouTube as it is taken by another legit account, you have to consider settling for a word or phrase that describes your products. For example the company http://www.elekta.com is using this channel very successfully – www.youtube.com/wearefightingcancer – it fits their model and actually it works for them.

Tip -

- Tag your videos the same way you would use keywords in a web page.  Choose some targetted words e.g. if you are in the Digital Arts fields – “3D animation” and other less heavily searched words, “educational training videos”

- DO NOT REPEAT keywords. YouTube will take the commas away from keywords and make it into a sentence almost. So don’t say “3D Animation, Cool Animation, Awesome Animation” as it will default to “3D Animation Cool Awesome” – You will end up tagging the video with “Cool”, “Awesome” – not so bad, but you are a business, not a 14 year old surfing dude.

- Should I include client names when displaying the work we have competed? – your decision, may be nice to ask them first to make sure it doesn’t steal their thunder or release company secrets.

Other tips.

- Make your channel looks like your website, you are allowed to upload a background, change colors, fonts, links, etc.

- Always provide a link to your website in every video, fill in all the Additional information on your video (this Neuroscience Axesse Video has tons of info and a link to the product on their website – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhFQey6Asyw&feature=related)

- Try using different categories if you can, gives you a little more scope.

- Use the metrics inside YouTube to see who is visiting you, who is embedding your video. Contact them, could be a sales lead there…. Become friends with a lot of people, try first with similar companies – not competitors, add your friends, look at other videos and ‘Favorite’ them, build a community, comment on videos.

- When creating a video watermark it or start and end the video with your logo or website link. If someone embeds the video on their site or blog you will have a free ad.

- Offer a link to your website to view the video in HD if you have a streaming server or users can download the file.

Hope that helps.

Almost 6 months ago I answered a question in a forum.

“How long will it take a website to get from a 6 to a 7? And does it really make a BIG difference?:whistling:”

There were a few answers, none of which I thought really helped the new user, so I put pen to paper, well, fingertips to keyboard.

This is a brief overview of what I would do to increase your Page Rank

1. Deleted duplicate content for the site
2. Followed up on inbound links, worked to get a good authority
3. Stopped all PPC & Ad Words campaigns
4. Started a blog, blogged 3-4 times a week
5. Created RSS feeds
6. Created a Twitter profile, talked to customers, linked news articles to our content
7. Fixed / Updated our profile in many, many, many online directories
8. Bought relevant domain names and created satellite sites for in-depth content and pointed them to landing pages
9. Created well structured landing pages (for #8, paper ads, etc.)
10. Checked our stats on a daily basis, to see which pages / sections are working, which are not
11. Ongoing – content review, updating pages, adding new content, archiving (not deleting) old content
12. Updating keywords on all pages, using the ‘long tail strategy’ for lower level pages
13. Increased our activity in the social media arena – became active in forums, etc.

and much much more.

The result – more fresh content, Google reviews our page every 48 hours. Our pages and Press Releases are fully optimized, more inbound links – people want to link to us as we are thought leaders, leaders in our field, Hospitals and .edu’s are linking to us. Our traffic has increased globally, not just in the US.

(this forum entry actually gave seed to two blog articles, one by the Inbound Marketing Software Giants, Hubspot – http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/4957/13-Steps-That-Transformed-One-Company-From-Invisible-King-to-Sought-Leader.aspx and my good friend Dan Ronken’s blog – Pull Not Push – http://www.pullnotpush.com/Pull-Marketing/bid/18469/Pull-Marketing-for-Healthy-Website-by-Savvy-Medical-Company-Part-I & http://www.pullnotpush.com/Pull-Marketing/bid/18544/Pull-Marketing-for-Healthy-Website-by-Savvy-Medical-Company-Part-II

This of course was for a site that was already a Google Page Rank of 6 that went to a 7, mostly due to the above changes. What are the steps to go to a page rank 8? Well, links and traffic are possibly the only way to achieve that, but it would mean adding a monumental amount of both.

Also, I have since created a new PPC strategy, corrected company profiles on numerous site, added facebook fan pages, created multiple twitter accounts for different depts / regions, mini regional sites, regional content, etc. 2010 is going to be a very busy year for this website. Check back soon, we may just get that PR8

Funny cartoon from Hubspot : http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/5428/Social-Media-Gurus-Anonymous-Support-for-the-Self-Proclaimed-cartoon.aspx?source=Blog_Email_[Social+Media+%22Gurus%22]

Just as everything in life, you need to plan. Creating a Twitter account is no different.

1. Choose a good name. It’s late in the day now, most of the good names are taken, but try to get one that represents your company name.

2. Create a great thumbnail, be personal. Logo’s are ok, but a face of well chosen image works best

3. Twitter backgrounds. If you can make an image, great, then do it. There are tons of templates out there, you can even pay a small fee and get one tailor made for you. Be sure to add you website address, tagline, social groups, etc. Don’t go overboard….

4. Write a great bio. Characters are limited, but make it count. Remember a link to your website

5. Twitter is searched by all major search engines, so be careful what you tweet, you may forget it, but Google won’t.

6. Add keywords to your tweets

7. Use your tweets wisely, send links to meaningful content

8. Retweet other as you would like them to retweet you

9. Don’t buy followers, earn then.

10. Dont tweet too much, your followers may abandon you.

There is a common fault I seem to find in every website I am asked to look at to help increase the search engine presence of. Naming convention. Maybe it stems from my time writing databases or computer programming, but I always chose to describe everything in as much detail as possible. Today we have 255 characters to work with, so let’s be descriptive.

Some tips.

- Give all of your images a good description.

- Use a very similar description in the ALT tag

- Microsoft Word and Adobe Acrobat documents both allow you to add Meta info and descriptions. So many parts can be optimized.

The document title, the files name, the author, the subject and of course the keywords. Make sure the content of the document follows the normal SEO rules and you will now have a fully optimized file ready to FTP to your site.

Here is an example for Acrobat.

SEO Help for Acrobat Files

Everyone jumped on the Flickr bandwagon hoping for some free SEO help, and we all got it until that day that Yahoo added ‘NoFollow’ to tags and comments. Boo, hiss. Wait, all is not lost. What you need to do is get right over to this blog post and take some notes:

http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/flickr-is-not-useless-for-seo/ -
Flickr is NOT useless for SEO by Will Paoletto

1.) Flickr has not added nofollow to discussion boards. For those of you who liked to scout out high PageRank pages and just drop your link as a comment to the photo, which could be accomplished easily if you owned a link-laundering website, you can still do this in the Flickr group discussion boards. Flickr has not yet added nofollow tags to those, and given the preponderance of discussions that revolve around people sharing photos, you can just as easily drop relevant external links in the discussion and reap link juice benefits.

2.) Flickr has not added nofollow to personal profile pages. If you have a personal profile page, you can place targeted anchor text on it, point links at it, and receive full SEO benefit as it gains PageRank.

3.) Flickr has not added nofollow to group pages. If you own a Flickr group, you can still put as many links as you wish on the main group page without fear of them being turned into nofollow.

It’s tough to pick a side. A new site is generally hidden and need a bit of promotion, however like any PPC (Pay Per Click) campaign, it only works as long as the money lasts. A good SEO plan will start slow and snowball, so why not use PPC’s to fuel traffic in the early days? SEO is essential to give longterm results, once the site is established you can once again use PPC campaigns when necessary, such as you promotional times.

When you first launch your site you have no links, you have not been indexed by any search engines, you will not rank for any keywords, so PPC is essential to get noticed.

Once your first PPC campaign has completed you can then use the results to see which keywords converted best, pump the details back into your SEO plan and you should have a site that performs well and is more cost effective.

No Bullshit

It is great to have new, fresh content on a regular basis, everyone knows that, but write good copy and don’t over do the SEO.

I like reading blogs, but when confronted with copy that is deliberately loaded with keywords, buzzwords or Gobbleygook words, then I have to stop reading. SEO is for search engine ranking and usually doesn’t go well when you get a human to read your blog.

As Tim Jahn (@timjahn) put in (in Sunday’s #Blogchat) – “Don’t forget about quality of content. Telling tons of people about your shitty content helps no one.”

Copywriters can take your content and make it readable, enjoyable, entertaining, interesting, absorbing, engaging, gripping, enthralling, engrossing, stimulating; informal unputdownable (is that a word?) – so use their services. Don’t let SEO determine how you should write, but don’t forget to add some nice keywords or branding messages.

Suggested reading – Mack Collier’s Blog – The idea that ‘content is king’ in blogging is total bullshit

sitemap

Site Maps, don’t have one? Then get one.

Search engines love sitemaps – not necessarily for ranking, but for finding links on your site.

Search engines prefer XML site maps, human like HTML site maps. Use both, put them in the root folder of your webserver.

Your CMS may automatically create a site map, but if it doesn’t, then…

Free Tool for Site Maps

Google – http://code.google.com/p/googlesitemapgenerator

What is a ALT tag?

Yahoo Slurp, Googlebot, MSNbot, etc. are automated programs send out by search engines to catalog and index your site. As they are basically computer programs, you can guess that they love text & code. They will not grade you on your lovely images as they really can’t see them. So what to do?

Easy, add some code to describe your image so that the ‘bot’ or ‘spider’ can easily catalog the image. Enter the ALT tag.

A quick example of an image with an ALT tag:

	This is a tree. You know that because you can see it. The ‘bots’ will pick this up partly because I have correctly named the file – ‘tree.jpg’, but in order to help out a little more I am going to add an ALT tag.
Tree	This is the same image with an ALT tag and description

And the code for this is:

ALT Tag Code

alt=”tree” being the part of the code needed for the search engines to ‘see’ this image.

Before you go overboard adding ALT tags to every single image, have a plan. Don’t use the same tags for everything, you have 255 characters to play with, and no need to label spacer.gifs

H1 tags

If you wrote this HTML Code on your page:

H Tags

you would see the following:

This is heading 1

This is heading 2

This is heading 3

This is heading 4

This is heading 5

This is heading 6

H1 tags are one of the most important part of SEO which is the header tag situated in body of a website. It can be termed as the most simple form of header found on a web page. Through h1 tags search engines come to know about the site content details. If its used in proper co-ordination with anchor text and title tag then you can even expect increased density of website traffic from major search engines like Yahoo, Bing and Google.

Although the feature of h1 tags is not new and has present for many years, only in the last few years has its significance grown due to increased demand by Google. It carries much more importance than keyword meta tag and description meta tag. The best position to place these H1 tags is at the header situated above the content.

h2 tags can be used for subtitles, and carry less importance than h1. Only 1 h1 tag should appear on a site.