SEO: Three Easy Pro-Tips

Written by Aaron Houghton of www.boostsuite.com

Three Easy Pro-Tips for Search Engine Optimization – SEO

Aaron Houghton is a co-founder and CEO at BoostSuite.com, the collaborative marketing platform for small businesses. Aaron has over 15 years experience building and selling marketing products to small businesses around the globe.

When it comes to promoting your website with search engine optimization (SEO) you’ll hear the most obvious advice just about everywhere you turn. Write about relevant topics. Make sure to include your keywords in your page titles and large text headlines. If you’re going to promote your business with search engine optimization then these rules are table stakes.

But when it comes to turbocharging your search engine optimization strategy, there are a few things that can really push you ahead. Follow these tips and you’ll likely take advantage of huge opportunities that your competitors haven’t even considered trying yet.

Secret #1: Set Up a Google Plus Account

Seriously. No it’s not because all of your customers are already using Google Plus. They probably aren’t, even though the budding social network is growing rather quickly. You need to do this because Google is the company behind Google Plus and Google Search.

If you want your website to rank highly in the search engines you must claim a personal Google Plus profile and begin tying it back into the content on your website. Here’s how.

Every time you write a new blog post make sure to link your author bio back to your Google Plus profile. Google will notice the author attribution and will start using the photo associated with your Google Plus profile alongside your pages when they are displayed in the search engine results.

Having an author image beside a page result has been shown to increase clickthroughs from searchers by 150%. There is no better way to get an INSTANT lift in search engine traffic than to increase the rate at which searchers click through to your pages. And adding Google Plus links to your new blog posts is incredibly easy to do.

Secret #2: Let Your Customers Guide Your Content Creation

Everyone knows that creating good content on your website is essential to attracting visitors from search engines and social networks. But the most obvious way to make sure you have a great content is often overlooked.

Great content is content that is really interesting to your most valuable new customers. And the best way to learn what your new customers want to learn about is to ask them. Just a few simple questions can guide your content strategy in amazing ways.

Ask for unanswered questions they have about your business. Ask them to explain your products or services to you in their own words. Ask them why they purchased your products instead of your competitors’ products. Ask them what worries them most about their businesses as they look at the next year.

Then get to work. Write new content for your website and online marketing channels that answers these questions and solves your customers’ biggest problems. There is no better content strategy than one that is driven from your actual target audience. You can never guess everything they need. So don’t guess, ask.

Secret #3: Test Headlines On Your Most Important Pages

Search engine optimization isn’t just about attracting visitors to your website, it’s about convincing them to stick around after they land on your site. In fact these two goals are highly tied together.

Google pays attention to how long visitors remain on your website after they send them there. Websites that frequently bounce visitors back to conduct another search in Google are penalized in the search engine results rankings. So you need your visitors to stick around for at least a minute or two if you expect to earn and hold a top position.

Since large text headlines are often the first things people read when they land on a web page, you need to be testing various headlines on the most popular pages on your website. Use a tool like Google Analytics to find pages that visitors reach first, then use a tool like Google Content Experiments to test different large headlines on these pages. Look at how each headline performs over time and pick the headline that convinces visitors to stick around for the longest time.

You’ll get more engaged website visitors and higher search engine rankings in result.

Never neglect the basics when it comes to search engine optimization. But if you’re already doing the most obvious stuff, follow these three tips and you’ll blow your competition away and you’ll take top rankings that will deliver your best new customers to your website first for a very long time.

 #SEO #Tips #SearchEngineOptimization

 

SEO: Three Easy Pro-Tips

How Video improves SEO

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is an important process that affects your website’s visibility and ranking in a natural/organic search. Many do not realize that video is an excellent tool for SEO and that it can greatly benefit the visibility of your site.

Using Video for SEO Purposes

Using video as a means to boost your SEO can be beneficial to your company in more ways than one: video can help create brand awareness, increase your conversion rate, and of course improve your rankings within search engines.

For one, people love to watch video. Today alone, 89 million people in the United States are going to watch 1.2 billion online videos today. It’s important to take advantage of these numbers when improving not only your brand/image, but also your website. Video serves as yet another means of enticing viewers to your website, and increasing the time they spend on it.

It is important to take advantage of the SEO tools and outlets that are available to you. For one, YouTube has a great deal of optimization tools that will not only help drive traffic to your video but also improve your visibility in searches.

YouTube is the world’s second largest search engine and people are consuming video at an astonishing rate, yet video is often an afterthought in most SEO strategies. Even when it has a place, most marketers don’t invest in best practices for optimizing their video assets for SEO. Consider that good news and an opportunity to get a step ahead of your competitors. Adam Kleinberg, Traction

Optimizing Video for Google SEO

You are 53x more likely to appear on page 1 of Google’s search results if you have video on your website. Search engines are looking for websites that have the right amount of information without overwhelming audiences, credible sources and links, as well as informative pictures and videos. Having video on your website improves your SEO (since video is ranked higher than text) and your chances of showing up as a video link on the first page. Also, if your website shows up as video link, it is 41% more likely to get clicked than a text listing.

You can greatly boost your SEO by transcribing your video as well. Essentially, these transcripts are a textual representation of your video’s seen and heard content. Once transcribed, Google is able to crawl the text, thereby amplifying your search presence. Not only can you transcribe your videos and add them to your website, but you can also add captions/subtitles as well. In the case of YouTube, after uploading, captions are indexed by both Google and YouTube, in turn boosting your ranking within both search engines.

A study compared 37 web pages before and after adding transcripts. Pages with transcripts earned on average 16% more revenue than they did before transcripts.

Looking for a video to help improve your website’s SEO? Contact Keywest today.

How Video improves SEO

YouTube Optimization: Top 7 Techniques

7 Simple Ways to Optimize & Increase Your Businesses YouTube Presence  

With YouTube being the second largest search engine after Google, it is no wonder why a company’s YouTube channel is an integral part of their overall marketing strategy. As with anything online, the clutter and chaos can be overwhelming, so here are some tips and techniques on how to break through the crowd and get your channel noticed.

1.       Customize Your Channel

Ensure that the branding of your channel is done in a fashion where visitors will be certain whose channel they are viewing. It should be cohesive with your other branding strategies, not only in the look and feel, but throughout the content as well, be it the video itself, the video’s description, or even your comments on others videos. As every point of contact with your audience is another opportunity to convert them into customers.

2.       Engage with your audience

While some may think of YouTube as a place where businesses can simply upload and distribute their content, it is so much more than that. YouTube, just like other popular social platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter, is also a place where you can actively engage with your audience. Through the comments section, your playlists, channel subscriptions and ‘favorited’ videos, you will be able to tell the story of who you are as a company, and in return understand who your customers, or potential customers are as well.

3.       Provide awesome video content

On the WebSEO Analytics Blog, Tina outlines her top 10 tips for optimizing YouTube videos. In there, her number one tip is to create original and interesting videos. Along with numerous other lists I checked out, content was always a priority. As it doesn’t matter how many tricks and techniques you can employ, if the content is not engaging there is no reason to attract people to it. You want each video you post to be a positive representation of your company and help your company’s overall marketing goals.

In order to do this your video content needs to be engaging for your audience. At Keywest we suggest that videos going on YouTube or other social media avenues are short and sweet. Another priority is trying to create content that your customers can’t find elsewhere. Whether it is a great tutorial on how to use your product, secrets of behind the scenes at your organization, or simply funny stories from your staff. Think out of the box, and whenever possible think big!

4.       Don’t forget a call to action

Once you have created your preliminary content there are several ways to optimize your video to further encourage viewer engagement. One of those techniques is provided right within YouTube and is called annotations. Annotations are a free and easy way to share additional resources and add an element of interactivity into your video. Annotations allow you to simply embed a link within your video which will then bring viewers to your website, a fundraising campaign, your YouTube channel or other videos you have posted. This is an excellent tool, as if you already have someone’s attention, you might as well steer them towards other content of yours that they may be interested in.

There are other avenues which will provide similar results. Creating a call to action or next steps can be done right within the video as well. In many of Keywest Video’s video blogs we incorporate a call to action within the video content itself, by getting the host to say things such as ‘tell us your thoughts in the comments section’, or ‘email us at info@keywestvideo.com for more information’. This way, the call to action cannot be ignored as it is just as much part of the video as the rest of the content.

5.       Make sure to cross-promote

Maybe you can write a blog post about a recent video you posted on YouTube. Or you can link to your other social media channels at the end of your YouTube video. There are many ways to integrate your company’s various marketing outlets within one another, so ensure that this is done. It will not only help promote your various content, but it will ensure that your brand is being consistent throughout their different promotional avenues.

Another important avenue, cited by the Search Engine Journal, is by embedding your YouTube videos on your website. Depending on content and relevancy, posting videos on your website can be a great asset for your company, and aid in a variety of ways from simply explaining your product or service, providing an overview of your company or employees, or highlighting event coverage. In return, this will be a great way to gain more views on your videos, which will in turn aid your YouTube profile. So it’s a win-win!

6.       Be SEO Friendly

When uploading your content to YouTube always ensure that you are taking the few extra steps in order to optimize your content for search engines such as Google. Ways to do this include; writing a title that utilizes relevant keywords related to your business, providing a clear and detailed description of the video, including keyword rich tags, making sure the appropriate category is selected, and adding closed captions for the hearing impaired. All of these techniques are beneficial as they make the video more searchable and therefore easier for your audience to discover. Brian Honigman writing for KISSmetrics, clearly lays out why these SEO techniques, or rather the technical term MetaData, are so important. He also provides some in-depth analysis of well-known companies’ channels and their hits and misses in this department.

 7.       Invest in your content

YouTube is a great place for cost-effective promotion, as getting an account set-up and your content online is virtually free, minus your time and investment in the video. However, there are ways to guide those who may be interested in your content directly to it, and that is through paid video advertisements. There are numerous categories you can select from in order to target your key market. Including things as specific as age, race, gender, economic status, and as useful as online habits and likes and dislikes. If you are wondering about how useful online video advertising is, check out Keywest’s recent video blog which discusses some important statistics about the growing marketplace.

As you can see from this list, there are a variety of reasons why YouTube optimization is important,  and now your are equip with some techniques to ensure that you are maximizing its true potential. If you follow these simple steps you are sure to make progress in getting your brand out there, and encourage your audience to engage further with your company. Check out Keywest’s YouTube channel and let us know what you think.

YouTube Optimization: Top 7 Techniques