SEO, Internet Marketing, and other things I don't know much about…
Posts tagged SEO
Video SEO Tips
Mar 11th
As we delve deeper and deeper into Web 2.0, we are finding that unique, dynamic and interesting content is becoming more and more important. YouTube is now the second largest search engine after Google, and we are finding that people are having substantially less interest in reading content which is full of text. From an SEO persepctive people are almost 10 times more likely to link to a blog post which has a few different types of content (video, images, lists etc.).
I’m a huge fan of videos, because at worst at least you are increasing brand awareness, credibility, and hopefully some direct traffic. On this note, it’s worth having a watermark over the video for those few people which type web address’ directly into their browsers.
Video for Linkbait
Can you think of a good article that you think people would be enticed to link to? Why not try making an interesting video instead? The video first caught on as a good SEO, linkbait, marketing tactic when a few people began releasing very interesting/funny/infromative videos and noticed they spread across the web incredibly quickly. We now know this phenamonom as a video going “viral”. If you happen to host an interesting/funny/informative video on your website, or a page within your site, you will find it draws an incredible amount of links!
Video for Direct Links
Created a video that’s hosted on your website? You can pump it out to a few different video sharing websites and get some DIRECT links in return. Here is a handy list of 12 do-follow video sharing websites. Don’t simply limit your submissions to video sharing websites with “dofollow” links. Make sure you submit to YouTube and other major video submission website to ensure your link profile is kept relatively natural, and as Google’ postition on nofollow links seems to change day-to-day it can’t hurt to have a few nofollow links!
SEO for Video
Want to get your video at appear at the top of the YouTube SERP’s or even Google results? Then you will have to embark on some SEO for your video. Essentially SEO for video follows the same conventions as SEO for standard websites. Try and get some links to your video on YouTube (be sure to link to it from your website). Google and YouTube also seem to take into account the number of views a video has, so try to optimise your video for highly searched terms. Here is a little tip if you are struggling. Find a video in your niche that has a large number of views, then copy that video’s ‘tags’ exactly and you should appear very highly in “Related Videos”. Don’t be afraid to respond to somebody else’s video as well, as this is also a good way to piggyback of somebody else’s success.
As always, leave a comment.
What is a Link Worth?
Feb 5th
After quite a long break, we’re going to get back into it!
Linkbuilding, whether we like it or not, is hugely important in SEO. Links are what set Google apart from the rest of the search engine crowd, and what makes them the multi-billion dollar company they are today. Back in September, 1998, two young men thought that websites should be judged by the number and type of external links a website had pointed at it, as opposed to solely focusing on on-site features.
One of the most difficult parts of linkbuilding is deciding what a given link is “worth”. Not so long ago, we relied solely on Google PageRank as it appeared in the toolbar. This is not a terrible way of deciding how much a link might be worth, as PR is in some representative of how influential a website is (as PR is based mostly on the amount and type of incoming links to a site). However, just getting a link from a PR 6 website might not be worth what you think it is. As toolbar PageRank is only updated approximately every 3 months (sometimes more like 4 or 5 months), it is impossible to say what a site’s PR is at any given moment. Matt Cutts’ has confirmed that PageRank is a dynamic quantity, and is actually changing day to day.
So can you use PR as a measurement for working out the value of a link? You can to a point. Check out the following table to work out how much a link from different levels of PR is worth…
As you can see, as a general rule PR is worth 5.5 times as much for every level you go up.
When Google crawls a page and analyses all the data and content on a page, it uses something called latent semantic indexing (LMS). LMS does something that I don’t understand, but I’ll give it a shot! LMS, while still being a Google “robot”, tries to analyse a page in an almost human-esque fashion. LMS allows Google to see if a link is placed around other links, in related content, in content that bares no relation at all, in a footer etc. LMS can be your best friend or worst enemy. LMS can often tell if your link is natural and genuine, or part of a reciprocal link exchange or a bought link.
In saying all of the above, valuing a link is mainly about using common sense. Follow some of these pointers:
- Make sure that any link you are getting is related to the page that it will be pointing to (if not, the link may be worth less than nothing at all!)
- Avoid link farms. You can spot these as they will be pages that just contain a number of links with no useful content.
- (Google can spot link farms a mile away now. Don’t risk it!)
- Avoid reciprocal link exchanges where possible.
- At worst, try 3-way link exchanges
As always, I would love some comments, so let me know what you think!
Markup Your Site for SEO
Nov 18th
A simple aspect of SEO that is often overlooked, yet is vitally important, is having the correct HTML markup for your website. This simply means the use of the correct tags and HTML in the appropriate places. Using tags correctly will provide both SEO benefits, and should provide the user with the benefits of an easier to navigate website. It is something that should be done at the creation of a site, however if your site doesn’t have the correct HTML markup, don’t panic, as it shouldn’t take long to neaten up.
Try to Avoid <div> Tags
<div> tags are essentially meaningless tags that need to be defined by the editor. While they do have some use it is much easier and more SEO-friendly to use <h1>, <h2> etc. tags.
Use Header Tags Properly <h#>
By utilising header tags in the correct places you can show Google what are the important aspects of each page. For example, if your page is about “HTML Markup” use the following HTML towards the top of your page (wherever it should appear naturally) <h1>HTML Markup</h1>. This then shows the search engines that this is the main theme of your page. The <h1> tag should be kept quite similar to the page’s <title> tag.
If your page needs sub-headings, be sure to use the <h1>, <h2> and <h3> tags.
Utilise the Right Tags
Use tags like <strong> and <em> instead of, <b> and <i>, as the search engines interpret these tags better.
When forming a list, don’t simply add text with a <br> tag between each line. Add a proper ordered or unordered list. <ul> for unordered, and <il> for ordered.
Image HTML
A little known HTML fact is the importance of optimising your images for the search engines. Google uses images and the HTML surrounding an image to determine if the image matches what they believe the theme of the website is. Make sure you enter “alt” text in your image with your keyword. This is a good way to markup the HTML for your images:
<img src=”http://domain.com/image.html” alt=“these are the keywords I’m targeting” />
Be careful though, as Google will know when you are cheating! For example, if you optimise and image of a dog and use the alt text “cat”, Google will throw that image in the Google Image Search Results for “cat”. If it gets no clicks, Google will know it”s not an image of a cat and punish you.
Site Speed
Matt Cut’s recently announced at PubCon that site speed would be a huge SEO factor in 2010. So if you are running a slow (possibly flash-based) website, expect to be punished in the SERP’s in the next 12 months.
Here is a quick video by Google with some tips on improving your page speed. Also be sure to check out their website www.code.google.com/speed
As always, be sure to let me know if you have any comments or suggestions!
