Google Video Sitemaps: Get Your Videos On Google
Video on the internet is far from new, but most internet marketers have problems getting their videos to be noticed. Uploading videos on YouTube can be effective, especially because Google gives YouTube preferential treatment, but you can increase conversions by bypassing YouTube or other video sharing sites and have Google index your video directly. YouTube is designed to have to user stay on the site as long as possible, while you want the user to get on your site as quickly as possible. Just like a sitemap for a webpage, Google video sitemaps tell Google exactly what and where the file is. Google uses that information to index videos for video search. The sitemap is just a text file that gives Google the information on how to classify and pull up your video in search.
Clicking on the video will take the user directly to your website. This gives the user one less click to have to go through to get to your site compared to going through Google search, to a video sharing website to your site. Creating a video marketing campaign through video sharing sites is still effective, but the point of this article is using Google as the index. Video marketing is a potentially very profitable enterprise because the competition in videos is much smaller than in websites in general.
The sitemap allows you to tell Googlebot the duration, title, and description that goes along with each video. It is much easier for Googlebot to read text and almost impossible for it to figure out what a video contains otherwise. Almost all types of video except live streaming video are supported. You will use text tags tell where your landing page is, post the video’s URL, specify a video player if necessary, give a thumbnail, and set the duration. The sitemap is added through Google Webmaster Tools and is limited to 50,000 videos. Most Denver internet marketing companies are not near the 50,000 limit yet, but having a large number of quality videos is a good idea, because then Google will start trusting you as an internet video producer.
Instead of a sitemap, you can also use an mRSS feed. RSS 2.0 allows for better video support and may be easier to make than a sitemap. mRSS is older so most browsers and software support this coding. Once your sitemap is uploaded, you can log onto Google Analytics and track the exposure of your video. Creating video costs more than other content so you will want to be able to see what works well and understand what your ROI is. A Denver SEO company would track this by setting up 301 redirects from a unique url within your site for the video you submitted to see which visitors came from where. Without the sitemap uploaded, it is impossible to see if searches came from Google organic or video search.
Four Tips for Your Link Building Strategy
Written by: Nick Hantge
Link Building is Key for SEO
I don’t know about you but my life revolves around building links. The more links I can get for a website the better chance I have of being listed on the first page of the major search engines. With the number of people switching their methods of how they find information, getting on the first page of Google is a great way to gain new business. Our Denver SEO company manages several Colorado companies’ search engine optimization (SEO) campaign. It is our job to handle the link building strategies, make sure traffic is growing and that their online visibility dominates their competition. Since link building is so crucial I thought I would give a few tips for finding quality links for your website.
1.) Relevance is Important: Have you ever been on a website and noticed links for something completely different from the page content or theme of the website? Chances are you did not click on them because you were not interested in a different subject. (EX –> you did not visit a website about power tools hoping to find information about real estate) Google’s main purpose is to provide accurate search results to keep the web surfers using their search engine. That being said, we have found that we get more “link juice” from links that are relevant content. It makes sense right? If Google’s goal is providing accurate search results, links from sites that are not relevant should not be rewarded as much as those that are from related sources. Although Google does not come out and say it, our SEO company has found the more links we can get from relevant sites or pieces of content, the better our ranking in the SERPs.
2.) Make Sure You’re Being Followed: If you are new to the SEO world you might be shocked to find out that there are links that Google will completely ignore. There is actually a tag a web developer can include on the link that tells the “Google bots” to skip over the link. In a search engine optimization campaign it is important to know the difference between a do-follow and no-follow link. If you spend countless hours building links that are not being scanned by the Google bots you just wasted a bunch of your time. There are a few ways to tell if a link is a no-follow link. Check out the source code for the rel=“nofollow” tag or just simply download a toolbar application that will highlight no-follow tagged links.
3.) The Name of the Game is Numbers: Building backlinks is a numbers game, the more you get the better off you are. Link building is an ongoing process; if you stop you will fall in the rankings. Many people find this out the hard way and have to put even more time into their project than they would have had to if they continued to work on it.
4.) Keywords Are the Key: If you want to get ahead in the game, make sure you are using your keywords in the links you are creating. If you are trying to rank for a search term lik “Denver real estate agent” and you do not have any links to your site with that keyword phrase, it will be near impossible to rank well for that term. A link that has anchor text is much more valuable that the simple www.yoursite.com because you are not telling the search engines or your readers what your site is about.
Hopefully this will help you when thinking about search engine optimization and has helped you understand the value of link building. Remember, onsite optimization will only take you so far in the search engines. If you want to show up for competitive keywords, make sure you are using a link building strategy. If you follow these four tips, you should see a major improvement in your rankings in just a few months. If you need more help with your search engine optimization campaign, please contact us at our Denver SEO firm (303) 999-7963
Are Your Getting The Right Visitors?
- Are your visitors the kind that just look through your “medicine cabinet”? Maybe you are inviting the wrong guests to your website?
By: Cade Lee
All too often I hear feedback from website owners and business owners about getting the “wrong kind of lead” from their website. In otherwords, the visitors they are getting to the site are not their “ideal” prospect or customer. I would take this a step further and probably guess that their conversion rate is very low and that they are getting the “shoppers” that are browsing every site known to man for their particular search. While “shoppers” are important to every business it is definitely not the ideal customer any business longs for. So how do you bring the kind of visitors that you want?
Although things are changing in the search algorithms and the major search engines are providing more relevant results than ever before, there are still irrelevant results on the 1st page of search engine results for thousands of searches. This is not because Google, Bing or Yahoo do not have excellent algorithms or fantastic results for the searches being performed through their search engines. This is simply because they cannot read the thoughts or intentions of those inputting the keywords into their search engines. So, for that person who is looking for a local plumber in Denver, if they were to search for “plumber” odds are pretty good that the only relevant sites they will find will be in the pay per click or “sp
onsored links” section. They will not find too many “local” results in the search engine results or the organic listings. The searcher will find national companies or even a Wikipedia article, but they will not find a local company for their plumbing needs.
Google is already attempting to change this by providing results according to IP or the searchers location, but you can imagine what a chore it is to have to differentiate those search terms that would be more likely to engage with local business versus those that do not.
So in the meantime, what will you do with your internet marketing campaign? How can you attract those visitors that are looking for your services and products? The answer is to go for more specific key word phrases in your search engine optimization campaign. So for example, let’s take a printing business in Denver. This printer is putting together an internet marketing campaign in Denver as this is their primary target audience for business. Since I am using a real Read the rest of this entry »
Writing Articles for Internet Marketing Campaigns
Writing Internet Articles
Written by: Nick Hantge
Do you consider yourself a talented writer, but you’re not sure how to go about it? If you enjoy writing and you want to be able to make money off your skill, consider writing articles to help with other’s internet marketing campaigns. There is probably an SEO company in your area who would be willing to pay for niche related articles. Article writing is a great skill to develop and market yourself. Writing is in high demand so take advantage of your writing skills and make some extra cash. Well-written articles on any topic are always in high demand.
Get to the Point
Internet articles are written slightly differently to the conventional articles you read in the daily newspapers or magazines. Your style should be simple. The contents of the article should be pitched in a brief but informative manner to hold the person’s interest. Internet searchers are impatient and want to find information quickly as possible. This being said, keep your articles quick and to the point. Often times online articles are written with numbers or bullet points to guide readers through quickly.
Catchy Article Titles
Think about what will grab the attention of your audience, start with an attractive title. It will be the first chance you have to gain interest of searchers to your article and also help you begin your introduction. Writing a catchy title will separate your article from the others around it. A nice title may be the key to attracting searchers to your articles and getting them to click on your links driving more traffic to your site which is obviously the main point of any internet marketing campaign. Read the rest of this entry »
How Important Is Your Blog?
Blogging is an integral part of your SEO Campaign
By: Cade Lee
It seems that every time the topic of blogging comes up, customers ask us, “Why is a Blog important?” If I were to ask them if they wanted to originate business online, they would undoubtedly answer “Yes”. If I asked any prospective customer if they wanted to be on the first page of Google, I know I would get the same positive response. Everyone would like to attract attention online which is exactly why it makes it that much more difficult for anyone to draw a crowd online. There are several strategies of course to bring in the crowds; some of them are not the most ethical or considerate to say the least.
Are Keyword Rich Domains Worth It?
By: Cade Lee
I have read several articles and discussion on forums about “Keyword-Rich Domains” over the last several months and I though it important to mention a couple of things to be wary of when going out and spending a fortune on domains that seem like they might make sense for your business and major keywords. I should begin with what a “Keyword-Rich” domain is for those that are new to this and have never heard the term before. A “Keyword-Rich” Domain is simply a domain name containing the major keywords relevant to the site and SEO campaign that you are targeting. So as an example, in our industry many of the SEO professionals in Denver target the keyword “Denver SEO“. When you search for “Denver SEO” you will notice that www.denverseo.net is the 5th result. Digging deeper this site has a PR of 3 compared to many of it’s competitors who have earned a page rank of 4 or higher. This domain does have some age as it was created on May 03, 2006 so it is around 3 ½ years old. According to Google, there is one backlink from a web design directory, after further research we were able to determine that the domain has around 523 backlinks. When we compare this to some of the other competing websites that are ranked just below this website like www.hyperdogmedia.com, which has a PR 4, 2 backward links according to Google and according to our research this domain has well over 2085 backlinks. So how is it that a site like Hyperdog’s is ranked below DenverSeo.net? According to some SEO professionals it would be due to the “exact match bonus“. There are many other factors that go into the rankings, but this is definitely a factor as it has been discussed by many internet marketing professionals.
3 SEO Tips That Will Give Your Website The Ranking You Need
The entire process of search engine optimization and internet marketing can be very frustrating. As a Denver SEO professional, I hear from customers frequently wanting to know the progress of their project. We document all of the work that we are completing on a constant basis, and we have many tools to mark their progression through the search engines. This got me to thinking about those that do not have access to the same tools that we do, as a matter of fact many who are marketing their websites will often give up as they don’t see immediate results from the many hours they have sat in front of the computer trying to obtain a page one ranking. Read the rest of this entry »
Keywords Don’t Matter
By: Cade Lee
You might be surprised to learn that Matt Cutts, who works for the Search Quality group at Google has most recently come out with comments about meta tags or more specifically “keyword” meta tags and stated “Google does not use keyword meta tags” in their rankings. For the longest time many SEO professionals pounded the desk suggesting that keyword meta tags were critical for any SEO campaign. Read the rest of this entry »
Can alt text help your SEO?
By: Cade Lee
Can alt text really help your SEO campaign?
Often times as I read through all of the resources online for internet marketing, I read about the importance of “on-site” optimization. We have discussed it ourselves in the past (onsite optimization). Something I don’t think we had discussed was the importance of keyword use in the alt text or title tags. Granted many have disagreed with the importance of alt text or title text in the SEO community. It is important to understand that there is not a SEO professional that I have met who knows the algorithms intimately. So while there are many opinions that using alt text or title tags does not provide a benefit to your search engine campaign, I would respectfully disagree as I will prove with an example.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – An Overview
Written by: Grayson Thrush
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) entails a maelstrom of techniques and tactics with the end goal being to improve the ranking of a particular website in the search results of major search engines. Denver SEO can be broken down into two main categories, on site SEO and off site SEO.
On site SEO relies upon excellent content first and foremost. Content must be on topic, relevant, and contain a 5% – 8% keyword (words or phrases) density. This means that for every 100 words of content, five to eight keywords should be used. The keywords that will be used must be carefully researched using tools such as the free Google AdWords keyword tool. When choosing keywords, it is important to remember to think like the customer. What will they be searching for? These same keywords should also be embedded into the website source code via Meta, Title and Heading tags. This will help ensure a high page ranking for these search terms.
Also, the website should be organized with a clear hierarchical structure. Creating a site map will significantly enhance site structure and ability to be scanned by search engines. This will allow search engines to more efficiently scan the target website. The most important information on a given website should be placed at or near the top of the page. This will make it easier for search engines to find the content that you want them to find. Use text instead of images; search engines can only scan text, so all important information must be included in text. This should be done even if the message(s) being conveyed are duplicated in images, banners, etc.
Of even greater importance is off site SEO. This includes back linking to highly ranked sites. For example, you can submit articles to free online repositories with links to your target website embedded in the text. The Google search engine will interpret a page with many back links to highly ranked pages as being of greater importance, and will therefore increase its page ranking. Another tactic is to submit entries to a highly ranked online blog, with excellent content, important keywords and back links where possible. Furthermore, you can join appropriate, and highly ranked, online forums and post useful content with a signature containing a back link to the target website. You should submit your website to the major search engines’ web indices. This will speed up and enhance the optimization process greatly.
SEO is a multifaceted endeavor, and requires ongoing maintenance and tuning. There are many competent companies that are dedicated to carrying out SEO campaigns. If page ranking is extremely important to you, consider outsourcing the project to a professional Denver SEO company.