Search Engine Optimization SEO Tutorial

Thursday, November 4, 2010

5 Secrets to YouTube Search Engine Optimization

When you think of search engine marketing, we live in a much bigger world than just Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

At the Search Engine Strategies Conference in Chicago, I sat in on sessions for YouTube and Facebook search optimization.

Answering what it means to be a search engine optimizer is more complicated than it used to be.

According to Alexa, the top three sites are:

Google
Facebook
YouTube

If you are looking to get the most exposure to the biggest audiences, you probably want to seriously consider some sort of campaigns with these sites.

In this column, I wanted to give you five secrets that you might not know about YouTube search engine optimization. Understanding these secrets could have a big impact on your ranking.

I got most of these from Greg Jarboe at his session on video optimization. I wanted to give credit where credit is due.

Secret #1

Get key phrase ideas from autocomplete suggestions.

These are currently searched key phrases at YouTube. If you are looking to make a video about something people are interested in, you definitely want to check out the autocomplete function at YouTube.

This is incredibly easy key phrase research to do. And you'll likely find some interesting topics to get your video making juices flowing.

Secret #2

Use the YouTube Keyword Suggestion Tool.

This is another great place to find ideas for key phrases for your video. You can also put a YouTube video ID in the tool and it will give you suggestions for key phrases to add to your video.

Secret #3

Use all the allowed space for titles, descriptions, and tags.

Titles should be about 100 characters.

Descriptions can include up to 5,000 characters, tags can be 120 characters. Make a goal to use every one of these limits for each of your videos.

From this YouTube blog post, "The more words you include in your description, the higher your chances of being discovered by searchers, which means the larger your audience can grow, and the more potential revenue you can earn."

Secret #4

Use annotations from this blog:

Encourage viewers to subscribe with an annotated subscribe button.
Use annotations to link to videos, playlists, channels, and more.
Use annotations to encourage feedback.

OK. Annotations aren't specifically for search optimization. But they are a great way to get people to either subscribe to your channel or watch another one of your videos.

Secret #5

Try YouTube Promoted videos.

This is paid search for your videos. These are the steps:

Choose one of your videos, write some promotional text, and tell us which keywords should trigger your promotion.
Using your keywords, your video promotion will now appear next to contextually relevant search results.
When a YouTube viewer clicks on your promotion, they see your video. You only pay when people click to see your video - not when people see your promotion.

YouTube is a huge opportunity for new traffic. Hopefully these tips will help you navigate that space in a more effective way.

Source http://www.clickz.com/clickz/column/1811575/secrets-youtube-search-engine-optimization

Tuesday, November 2, 2010

SEO Services Becoming More Important For Offline Businesses

Many traditional storefront businesses have no idea how important the idea of search engine optimization is for their bottom line. Otherwise known as SEO, optimizing a website for the search engines has proven to be extraordinarily beneficial for many traditional businesses that don’t totally operate online.

While online Internet entrepreneurs have long been employing SEO tactics, most offline businesses are far too involved in the day to day activities of their business affairs to worry much about ranking their websites. SEO services companies like SEOExpertGlobal.com exist for these businesses who want to take the worry out of the equation and focus completely on their own daily work.

The company has a large staff of SEO experts who all have varying backgrounds. They spend their work day taking care of tasks for hard working business owners who just want to see some revenue finally coming from their websites.

“Getting your site on the first page of Google is the main target of our SEO services. Without being found for your main keywords, you are losing customers and they are going straight to your competitors! To achieve a high ranking on the search engine results pages, considerable knowledge is needed on how search engine algorithms work and the keywords potential customers would search for in relation to your business,” according to Michel de Bakker , CEO and Founder of the company.

Source http://thenewsforyou.com/seo-services-becoming-more-important-for-offline-businesses/11515/

Monday, November 1, 2010

Christmas is the best time for SEO

The Holiday season is just a month away. And if you’re not optimizing your site’s content for Christmas now, it might already be too late.

Experts recommend that online retailers modify their search engine optimization (SEO) campaigns for the Holiday season.

This can lead to better conversions for pay per click (PPC) campaigns.

During the Christmas rush, shoppers are more likely to search for branded keywords rather than generic ones. And companies that recognize this can improve click-through and conversion rates.

Answering specific queries will be detrimental to the success of an SEO campaign this Christmas.

Source http://www.lastclicknews.com/christmas-is-the-best-time-for-seo-101950.html

8 Ways to Reduce Your Site's Bounce Rate

The Small Business Tips Series is supported by Bantam Live, a web-based collaboration workspace with "Social CRM" for small business teams. For more information visit BantamLive.com.

With the explosion of social media sharing and help from smart search engine optimization, many web users are bypassing businesses' home pages and landing directly on product pages and blog posts. Thus, businesses need to optimize their "first impressions" at all entry points in order to reduce bounce rates.

Bounce and exit rates are often confused, but have different definitions and purposes. Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors that hit a page and don't visit any others within the same site. It should be used to measure the effectiveness of landing pages and is connected to SEO and paid advertising campaigns. In some cases, a page may be designed to give the consumer the information they need and nothing else. In this instance, bounce rate may not be a relevant metric.

Exit rate, on the other hand, is the percentage of visitors that leave a site from a given page. It should be used to monitor specific pages in a process, such as a "shipping options" page that appears during the checkout process. A high bounce rate means you are making a bad first impression; a high exit rate means you have a leak in the process.

Web analytics guru Avinash Kaushik says a bounce rate of less than 30% is good, but with 60% or higher, you have a problem.

Bounce rate stats will differ depending on the type of sites and pages you're measuring. In Google Analytics, there is a benchmarking section that allows you to compare your site's bounce rate and metrics to other sites based on size and category.

A blog that offers all of its content on one page will have a high bounce rate. Generally speaking, blogs are reported to average an 80% bounce rate, and this paired with other metrics like time on site and number of comments could be more helpful. The best standard is to measure an individual page's bounce rate over time.

Here are eight ways to lower your site's bounce rate. Add your own thoughts in the comments below.

1. Make Data-Informed Decisions

Good web design is critical, but quick iteration and optimization can only be accomplished with data-informed decisions. This will empower your designers to experiment more.

Make sure the reporting is both easy to use and understand. Some of the top analytics packages have complicated user interfaces. In the end, the goal is to have usable and informative data.

2. Prioritize & Optimize

Look at your highest volume entry and landing pages to compare good pages to bad pages. You can also use additional tools like Crazy Egg heatmaps to see the relationship between referrer and clicks. Once you find the worst offenders, test multiple variables and landing page approaches.

If your traffic is less than 1,000 views per week, use A/B split testing for significantly different page design approaches. Use multi-variate testing with tools like Website Optimizer, Google's free website testing and optimization tool, for situations where you have a lot of traffic and multiple factors and variations you want to test.

3. Utilize Profiling and Segmentation

You can monitor the bounce rates for geography/language, browser/operating system and traffic source to identify issues. Recently at my company, we noticed a high bounce rate for Firefox, relative to Internet Explorer on a page and found out there was a browser rendering issue.

4. Maintain Keyword Integrity

Make sure the keywords you are using in your metadata have low bounce rates and that you are reinforcing the term in the copy and content you are showing to site visitors. Your own brand or site name should have the lowest bounce rate for a keyword.

In your search marketing efforts, if the bounce rate is high for keywords you are buying, you need to either improve the landing page to reinforce the topic or bid on keywords that are more relevant to your content.

5. Improve Loading Times

The loading time of your webpage is not only an important factor in SEO, but also in having a visitor to stay on your site. Deactivate unnecessary plugins and optimize your images and code to speed up the loading time of your site. Your visitors will be more likely to view additional pages if your load times are faster.

6. Be Careful with External Links

One of the consumer benefits of web publishing is that content providers often embed hyperlinks to reference external pages with more information. However, this can create an exit point for a user. You should be judicious in the use of external links or at least consider placing them toward the bottom of a page.

7. Don’t Get Tricky

There are lot of other tricks you can use to lower your bounce rate, like embedding polls, contests, and other attention-grabbing clickable content. However, if the sole purpose of these tactics is just to lower your bounce rate, you may lose sight of what a real consumer is looking for.

The temptation to use keyword and SEO-heavy headlines is strong, but if they misrepresent the content of an article or post, you may lose out on repeat visitors, even if your bounce rates are reduced temporarily. Although it is important to make a good first impression, a site's mission to either sell, entertain or inform should always be primary.

8. Account for Social Media

As more sites are discovered and consumed through social networks, the impact of these platforms on bounce rates is becoming more important. With social, there are limitations -- like Twitter's character count, for example -- to properly qualify and represent the landing page content. Use relevant hashtags to qualify your content, along with other metadata, like location, that can add more information without pushing the character count of your message. On the other end of the spectrum, sharing links on Facebook can be a rich experience, with images, user-input and friend-tagging. Utilize these platform-specific features to enrich the reader's experience.

Source http://news.yahoo.com/s/mashable/20101029/tc_mashable/8_ways_to_reduce_your_sites_bounce_rate

Six Things You Need To Tell Your SEO Consultants

Communication between website owner and search engine optimisation consultants is of great importance when running an SEO campaign. The SEO specialists will provide the business owner with a considerable amount of valuable information but the site owner must also provide them with information of significance too. If you are running an online business and working with professionals on a search engine optimisation campaign, you must be ready to share information with those working on your campaign.

You have to be prepared to tell your SEO specialists what you want to achieve from the running of an SEO campaign. SEO can help businesses in many different ways. For SEO professionals to be able to help you effectively, they have to know what is of most importance to you so they can help you to achieve it.

It is also beneficial for a site owner to immediately let their SEO consultants know any weaknesses within their business. If you are running a business, you will be aware of its current flaws. If you let your SEO specialists know this too, this will save time and effort and help get your SEO campaign on track quickly.

A website owner must also let their SEO consultants know how much they know and understand about SEO. SEO is a complicated subject and business owners have varying amounts of knowledge and experience. It is important for your SEO consultants to know how familiar you are with SEO so they can ensure you do not have unrealistic expectations of your SEO campaign and to ensure you are up to date.

It is also important when running an SEO campaign to let your SEO professionals know what internet marketing methods you have previously been using. This can help them to understand how you have approached the marketing of your business and assess how useful these techniques have been. This can help with future progression. By having an idea of what marketing methods you have been using in the past, your SEO consultants will be able to get an idea of how this type of method works for your business.

Budget is of great importance to business owners and should be something which is discussed with SEO specialists. Have an idea of how much you wish to spend on your SEO campaign and let those working on it know this. Respectable SEO consultants will then tailor your SEO campaign to your budget as well as your wants and needs.

Many business owners want to contribute to their SEO campaigns and if you are one of them, you must let your SEO consultants know. Tell them how you want to get involved and how much you want to take on and they will help you to do so successfully.

We at SEO Consult understand the great importance of communication between us and our clients. We are always here and encourage our clients to share all kinds of information with us so we can help their business. Work with us and produce impressive SEO results.

Source http://www.seoconsult.co.uk/SEOBlog/search-engine-optimisation/six-things-you-need-to-tell-your-seo-consultants.html

SEO Search Engine Optimization Free Backlinks

Search engine optimization in its most simple mode is a set of measures used to help make a website search engine favorable and have it appear in the search engines. At a more developed stage, SEO tools can be put in place to enable the website to rank high in the search engines.

Getting to the top of the search engines all comes down to backlinks and the relevance and page rank value your baclinks have. Baclinks can be hard to come by or costly to buy, ideally you would want free backlinks.

Websites get the largest amount of visitors via search engines if you apply SEO effectively. No one is aware of exactly how engines rank web pages other than the boss and software engineers in the company.

Nevertheless, it is rational to consider that every search engine has its distinctive protocol for ranking websites; in any other case all search engines will pretty much give similar outcomes.

Many specialists have found out that there are several SEO basics which will impact on just how search engines rank a web page. These SEO tips consider if key terms are used in the Web address of the site, utilized in the title of the web page, applied to the Meta text description, included in the content of the page and are making use of the tag. The principles also consider the number of internal and external back links (links from within the same site) that point to the page, if the external pages linking to the page are appropriate and if key terms used to link to the page are appropriate. It also looks at whether or not the graphics utilized on the page have different textual content that contains the key terms.

To get free backlinks visit http://www.freebacklinks.co/

Source http://newstoday365.com/seo-search-engine-optimization-free-backlinks/33687/

How do You Get Traffic with Local Search Engine Optimization?

If your business survives on local customers, you need to reach beyond local yellow page advertising and go online using local search marketing. A growing number of people are looking for local products and services on the internet, using a computer, iPad or smart phone device.

For many local businesses, internet marketing is a big unknown. It can be an overwhelming task to start - and do business owners have the time to figure it out anyway?

Although easy to ignore, establishing an online presence and local search engine optimization is becoming essential to most business's survival.

Here are a few simple tips to get started: Local Search Engine Optimization

Source http://cs.sbtv.com/Post/?id=3985