Archive for February 2010
Search engines can’t index video content they way they do plain text. From an SEO perspective, it can seem that video content can’t help with search engine optimization (SEO).
As it happens, there are several ways you can use video to improve your ranking in search engines…
- Get your video ranked in Google through back links
- Upload your video to a third party site with high credibility (e.g. You Tube) and work on getting it ranked
- Transcribe your video to improve indexing
Of these 3 strategies, the last is the most useful in the long term with respect to your own site. Over time, you’ll post more video content. Some of these will prove to be very useful. People will find them, and link to them from their own sites (i.e. they’ll become link bait).
The end result is increased PageRank and credibility with Google and other search engines. That benefits your whole site, not just the pages that contain your most popular videos.
The challenge is to make sure Google correctly indexes each of your videos. An excellent way to achieve that is to transcribe it and post the resulting text on the page that contains the video.
You can see an example of this technique on the following UK Pension Cash site.
As you’ll see if you visit the above site, the full content of the video is not transcribed. Instead the content has been summarised, giving a visitor enough information to get the jist of the video. And provide Google with enough words and phrases to correctly index the page.
Ask 5 web marketing experts how they think businesses should use social media, and chances are, you’ll get 5 different answers. Maybe more.
My own view is that any use of social media is valid if it supports the business. There isn’t one correct way to use social media. I’ve seen social media used successfully to do the following…
- Generate leads
- Raise awareness about a new product
- Provide customer service
- Get feedback from clients
- Communicate with customers
- Take the place of custom components on a website
The plain fact is, social media provides two things of use to a business…
- A set of web-based tools that achieve specific tasks
- A built-in community of users
These are both useful to a business, but the second is an irresistable lure to a business that gets in the way of understanding the potential of the media. The existing community is seldom interested in anything the business has to say.
I think the key to making use of social media isn’t to try and exploit the existing community, but to build your own community. That needn’t be orientated toward sales either.
One of my suppliers uses Twitter to post real-time technical updates when things go wrong. This keeps all their customers information, and ensures the technical staff are free to focus on the problem instead wasting time answering the same questions over and over again.
One of my clients uses Blogger as its News page (i.e. press releases and related snippets of news), rather than create a custom component on its website. The built-in features of Blogger are ideal for this purpose. And it has the added SEO benefit of being hosted on an external domain. Over time, the news ‘page’ has gained PageRank and so increases the client’s exposure in Google (who own Blogger).
A deep link is a URL that links to a page within a website. That is, a page that isn’t the site’s homepage. For example…
Abicord wants to improve the rank of the smoking cessation page on its website. This page isn’t on the homepage, though it is linked from it. The smoking cessation page is specifically focussed on a stop smoking product.
Abicord wasn’t interested in keyword research and is happy with the keyword density of the current content. All it wanted was additional backlinks to help boost its deep linking.
In particular, it’s interested in having this page show up in sub-listings when people search for Abicord in Google. And deep linking is the key to encouraging Google to incorporate extra pages in its sub-listing.
