SEO Moves Blog - Search Engine Optimisation and Internet Marketing Tips and Resources » Marketing

YouTube and Using Video on your Website

Phil — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 05:22:13 +0000

Video used to elicit a “meh” reaction from SEO experts, because search engines ignored them. But now that search engines are learning to index videos, and since videos are rapidly increasing in popularity due to the increasing availability of broadband, you ignore video content at your own peril. Right now, the HTML surrounding your video, as well as the video’s URL, filename, title, and meta data are extremely important in getting that video to help you with your SEO goals. Character recognition, speech recognition, and image recognition are expected to mature technologically enough that someday the video content itself will be indexable. But for now, we have to deal with these SEO basics of title, keyword, URL, and meta data optimization.

Google is now attaching captions to videos, and they’ve done some already. If there are captions for a video you own, you can download, edit, and upload them, adding another layer of SEO onto your video content, because Google indexes the caption files. There’s a backlog of old videos that YouTube is working on, but you can request auto-generated captions for videos you already put on YouTube if they haven’t been generated yet. This could be a whole new dimension of video SEO, and you might as well get a jump on it. Take a look at the three screen shots for some idea of what to expect.

Using Article Directories For Website Marketing

Phil — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 11:09:01 +0000

Will your efforts at writing and submitting articles about your website’s line of expertise to article directories be rewarded? In general, yes, but there are a few Dos and Don’ts to keep in mind:

Do concentrate your efforts on the top article directories, which are currently Ezinearticles, GoArticles, and eHow
Do write coherent, readable, high quality articles that actually tell the reader something they don’t know
Do follow the site’s editorial guidelines. Some are more stringent than others, but whatever they are, follow them
Do link to your articles from your Facebook account
Do post a Tweet with a link when you have a new article published
Don’t send the same article out to a bunch of article directories. Duplicate content isn’t your friend when it comes to SERP results
Don’t bother with sites that say they’ll submit your article to “hundreds” of articles directories. You won’t get much, if anything, from the effort.

A stable of good, original articles on top article sites can actually bring you more site traffic than if you had those articles on your own website (at least at first). For budget conscious webmasters, articles on articles directories are a form of free advertising. The “bio” and “resource” boxes article sites provide usually allow links to your website. Take advantage of any legitimate opportunities an articles site offers to link to your website.