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.

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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.

Many website owners and SEO professionals alike will try all sorts of gimmicks and tricks to obtain a page one ranking. I cannot say that we haven’t attempted everything to obtain a page one ranking as well. I think any good SEO company will need to experiment as much as possible (not with client projects), to understand the algorithms and search engine rankings better. So, with everyone vying for the 1^st page of Google or any one of the other major search engines, what can really differentiate you from the pack?

Over and over again, our blog has been one of the most important resources and reasons that we continue to be on the 1^st page of Google for relevant search terms to our site. We have had many comments on our blog, some positive and other’s negative. Overall it was comments we were looking for to begin with. We wanted to be noticed and we were able to do that most efficiently with our blog.

It was our intent to draw traffic to our site by providing quality, informative and useful content on our blog. I wished that I could say that we started publishing our blog and it brought in a flood of traffic to the site that was simply just not the case. Here were some of the best methods we used to attract attention with our blog:

1. Build useful applications or programs: I already know what you are thinking, “I am not a programmer and I would not know where to begin”. I understand this as we felt much the same way. The thing is that you have access to something in your arsenal, something that someone else would find useful. In our case it was a simple toolbar that we had created to help us keep track of SEO sites, resources and blogs. We distributed this toolbar to as many freeware or shareware sites that we could. We hosted the program on our site, so as we attracted visitors to the software, we were able to bring many new visitors to our site.
   
2. Providing Resources: By providing good and useful information online you are able to prove yourself as a trusted advisor. We have many clients that are in the “services” industry and over time we have had heard the same objection over and over again. “If I provide information for free to the public, what reason would they have to come and see me”. Granted there are a group of “do-it-yourselfers” that will take whatever information you can give them and run with it, these are usually not the customers that a “services” company would be looking for to begin with.
   
3. Create Unique and Useful Content: Following a most recent event or providing timely content can be very useful for readers of your blog. Whether you are utilizing creative content or image, even video, make certain that your blog stands out with originality. This is difficult to do. Often times, for us we will come up with an idea or theme for a new post or blog after we have read the thousands of e-mails that we get every day. Giving our opinion on a certain technique or software that we have been solicited for makes for interesting and useful content. At the end of the day you will just want to make certain that you spend time here making your presence different.
   
4. Covering an unpopular topic or controversial opinion: We had completed a blog article, “Do you need a web designer?”, you could imagine that many web developers and designers were very interested in what we had to say. The article title might have been a little misleading as we were not recommending that a company “not work” with a developer or designer, we were simply making the point that most designers do not take search engine optimization into consideration when creating a website. What could you do to make your title more alluring?
   
5. Utilize Anchor Text inside your blog. As you go through your content, make certain to link appropriate text to resources that would be useful for your audience. This is a good time to link to your site as well. So for example, throughout our blog you will notice that we utilize “Denver SEO“, Denver SEO Company“,”SEO Company” or “Denver Internet Marketing”. These obviously are some of the keywords that we would hope to appear on the 1^st page of Google for. You do not want to “keyword stuff” or spam throughout your blog, but using some keywords sparingly can definitely help and boost your rankings. Make certain that you use “alt text” when utilizing anchor text in your blogs as this can add some benefit to your SEO.
   

If your current SEO company is not doing this for you, then you might want to take a more active role in your search engine optimization. Your blog or blogs will have a lot to do with your campaign, so make certain that you invest the time necessary to differentiate your blog and make it useful.

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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.

We should probably begin with the explanation of “alt text“. The entire purpose of alt text was to give a description of the image if the image could not be loaded properly as well as a resource for the handicapped (especially the blind) so that as their “text reading” program described and read the page, they would be provided with a description of the image. The attribute can be applied to many different forms of media including video, but is primarily used for images.

So, why bother with alt text on images? As previously stated, alt text will provide screen readers and text readers with a description of the image, this also applies for the spiders that index the content of your website. By labeling images and media with alt text you are giving the search engines a description of media that they could not otherwise relate to your media. Surely by now you know that Google or any other search engine for that matter cannot see or comprehend what your image is without some kind of description from you the webmaster. So, they (the search engines) actually need you to tell them what an image represents. This is an awesome opportunity for you to influence the position in the search engines.

In the case of a project that we managed for a pet related business, we took the opportunity to label all pictures of the dogs with the name and breed of the dog. We resubmitted the sitemap to all the major search engines as well as created links to the pages as usual. Over the next several weeks we started to see a huge increase in the amount of traffic that we were obtaining for this account. The images were actually bringing in traffic themselves as they had been indexed and those searchers that were looking for images of the dogs that we had described were visiting our customer’s site after they had located the images!

Over the next several weeks, we noticed yet another increase in traffic as other sites were linking to our images and the pages containing the images from their sites. This brought in another wave of traffic. This project realized over 100% increase in organic traffic by simply utilizing alt text and title tags throughout the pages of our customer’s website.

I am not suggesting that alt text on all of the images of your site will increase traffic by 100%. At the end of the day, most of us are not in the pet industry or any industry for that matter where customers are looking for pictures of our product or services regularly. For example, if I labeled everyone of the images on our site with the keywords “Denver SEO“, it is very unlikely that I will obtain that many visitors from the images of my site; however, if I could get one of my images to show up in the organic rankings then perhaps my listing would stick out among all of my competitors as I would be one of the only results that had an image next to my title.

In conclusion, there is absolutely no way that completing alt text could hurt your campaign. Sure it is an additional step while completing your onsite optimization, but the time invested seems like it would be worthwhile considering that it is a small investment. I do want to emphasize that I do not believe that alt text will make or break your search engine optimization campaign, but I do believe it is worthwhile to add this element to your site. Making your site more useful to your users is what we all want to accomplish, so make certain that you are not keyword stuffing the tags and using legitimate short descriptions as this could definitely help your rankings for long tail keywords as well. At the end of the day, if nothing else, alt text will at least make your site more accessible to the search engines and those that access your site with screen readers, etc. If you are working with a seo company you would definitely want to check your images and make sure that they have been optimized with alt text or title tags.

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Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can serve as the linchpin to your overall marketing plan for your business.  Gone are the days when all you needed was an ad in the local phone book.  The most efficient way to drive leads to your business is through Internet marketing.  You need more than just a website, though.

A website that has not been optimized for search engine results pages (SERPs) will only serve as a digital business card.  Nobody will find it unless they know about it and where to look.  Your competition will quickly surpass such an outmoded approach.  You need to hire a Denver SEO consultant to help get your website seen by those searching for the products and/or services that your business offers.

A competent SEO company will offer a full-service approach to Internet marketing, in order to ensure that your SEO campaign is in fact successful.  You will need to start out by looking for a Denver SEO company on the Internet.  Here’s a good tip: if you search for SEO company, SEO consultant, SEO, Internet marketing, etc. the company you end up choosing should appear near the top of the SERPs.  The reason:  if a particular Denver Internet marketing company can’t get their own site near the top of the SERPs, they probably can’t do it for you, either.

Once you have chosen a particular SEO company, carefully examine the SEO consultant with whom you are to be partnered.  Do they act in a professional manner?  How much experience with Internet marketing do they have?  Can they provide examples and references to demonstrate that they have a track record of success?  Do they have as many questions for you as you do for them?  A good SEO consultant will begin by trying to understand your business and the goals you have for it.  This will aid them in one of the early steps in SEO, keyword research.

Do not settle for a mediocre SEO company.  Don’t shop by price alone.  Remember, you get what you pay for.  The success of your business depends on you choosing the best Internet marketing company possible.

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denver internet marketing,denver SEO,denver web development

Denver Web Development is absolutely key in helping to produce awareness, traffic, and sales for your company or product.  Just like traditional marketing campaigns, there are many specific skills required to be effective in your Denver Internet Marketing plan.  These skills include but are not limited to link building, web design, Denver search-engine-optimization, HTML writing, blogging, and social networking.  Techniques and trends are constantly changing as well, and it is important to utilize the experience and knowledge of a Denver SEO Firm or Internet Marketing Company.

It is important to set goals, and plan a complete strategy for building a valuable website and increasing the traffic to that website.  In addition to a clear website with substantial, valid content, you need to drive the site to towards the top of search engine results for targeted keywords.  This intricate, time-consuming process is called search-engine-optimization, or SEO.  A good internet marketing company will also handle Denver SEO for your business.  It is best to let experts execute SEO for you, because the ranking algorithms and industry trends are constantly evolving and changing.  A Denver SEO Company will keep up with the pulse of the industry, staying on top of all the new tips and tricks.

Denver Internet Marketing is paramount to staying on the cutting edge of any industry.  Create a strong, reliable Internet presence while at the same time being highly visible on local and global search engines.  Customize your plan to cater to your target audience, increasing your chances for sales, leads, and referrals.  The days of Yellow Pages are over, and you need to keep your business ahead of the curve by working with a Denver Internet Marketing Firm.  No matter what your industry, help yourself and take the right step towards a successful future.

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Press Releases are a very important way to distinguish or differentiate your company in the public’s view of your company. Most companies already understand this strategy and in one way or another they have used press releases to make special announcements or they have responded to some event. Today, with the internet press releases can be used in a myriad of ways that will assist in your search engine optimization efforts.

So how can it be done? How do you compliment your Denver SEO campaign with press releases? The press release campaign online is very different than your standard press release through traditional print media sources. If I working on a press release in Denver, I would probably distribute the PR to all of the local papers of course and then issue a second wave of press releases to my local publications and neighborhood publications. None of these are really going to assist with my search engine optimization in Denver, although by making mention of my website inside the press release I would probably receive some “direct traffic” from the release. Direct traffic in this case would be short lived and not give a permanent back link into my website. So, to answer my questions in the beginning here, I would distribute my press releases online to services on the web that enable you to link the content in the press release to your website. By adding one or two useful links in the article to your website or URL’s within your website, you will be assisting your Google PageRank and overall linking strategy which will affect your keyword position in the leading search engines.

Using distribution services is important because these sources of news usually already have a high page rank. So when they release the press release, usually the article will start to show in the top of the search engines for the keyword that you targeted throughout the article. So for example, if we released a press release on “Denver Internet Marketing” and we submitted the release with this keyword to the major online PR services, our article might likely show up for this search term through the PR sites. If someone searches for this term online and finds the article before they find our site, it is likely that they will click on our site within the article or perhaps one of the hyperlinked key phrases inside the article. The nicest part of this press release is that it does not get thrown in the trash with the daily paper, it remains online pointing at our site for as long as the press release service keeps it up!

These online PR services can cost anything from $1 up to $315.00 and they all seem to offer different programs. What I mean is that some are enhanced for SEO purposes while some of the better performing services like prweb.com and prnewswire.com are a little more traditional with their services. Remember to follow Google’s guidelines when creating your press release, you will want to establish a release that has useful content and that is not stuffed with keywords. So a couple of examples of releases that might work for your business would be the announcement of a new location, a new service or product that your company is releasing or perhaps you are speaking at a tradeshow or industry event.

Preparing your release is important as you will want to target the keywords in your press release, but you will also want to make the release useful and readable. Making the release readable and useful is priority number one; however, if you can include your keyword phrase in the title or headline and utilize the keyword or phrase in the first paragraph with a link back to your web site, this will assist in the optimization of the release. You do not want to force the key phrase in to your press release; it should be an organic process (Some tips to avoid keyword stuffing).

Many companies pass the opportunity of using PR as they believe it is too expensive and does not deliver enough benefit to their marketing campaign. If they are simply looking at the short term, they are correct. If they are focusing on optimizing their site and obtaining an excellent online presence than a press release online is one of the cheapest and most ethical ways to obtain solid back links to their site. One of the biggest “pros” that an online press release can achieve for your company is that it will establish another link to your company’s website from a credible source. So for those customers that have found you online and now want to review what “others” are saying about you, this press release might come into play as they are researching your company and assist them in their buying process.

Cade Lee is a search engine optimization professional in Denver, Colorado. Working at Iniquitous, Inc. as a professional SEO, Cade actually assists companies in obtaining a larger web presence through social networking, article marketing and video marketing.

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It is almost impossible to not throw yourself into the design of your new website. When we were designing our brand-new website, we made some of the very same mistakes that we see clients make on an ongoing basis. We included aspects or features to the website that we really liked, and we forgot for a moment that our demographic or audience is business owners and business professionals. For us we are going to have to go back to the drawing board and redesign a completely brand-new website that focuses strictly on professionals, and their pain or needs for Internet marketing versus making it more fun and personal for us. I think it’s very easy to forget who you are designing a website for.

The same goes for search engine optimization, it is so often that we see customers suggest key phrases and keywords that definitely apply to their business; however, “John Q. Public” will probably not use the key phrases and keywords originally selected by the business owner. For example let’s take my industry, I am a professional search engine optimization expert in Denver, and I think that probably one of the most used search terms for customers that are looking for our services would be “Denver SEO“. When we talk with customers about how they found us online, we find that they very rarely come to us using that exact search term. For us the search term Denver SEO makes the most sense as we are in the business, and search engine optimization is most often referred to as “SEO”, so would that make the most sense that companies and marketing professionals in the Denver area would type in “Denver SEO”?

The fact is that most of these companies or individuals that are searching for search engine optimization and Denver do not use the keyword “Denver SEO”. When I look at the analytics for our project, most of the searchers that do come to our website are finding us through the search term “Denver SEO”, yet when I speak with customers that have found our website online and called us they have usually used a different key term or keyword phrase. Perhaps “Denver SEO” is so popular because it is our competitors that use this term, or maybe it is industry professionals that are involved in internet marketing. My point here is that the customers that are calling usually type in something much different like “Denver Interent Marketing Companies“. So although we are getting much traffic from obtaining a first page ranking for the keyword “Denver SEO”, we also have to consider other extrapolations of that keyword such as “Denver Seo company, Denver Seo firm, Denver Seo professional, Denver search engine Optimization Company, search engine optimization Denver, etc.”

The extrapolations or longer keyword phrases are usually much easier to obtain a page-one ranking than a one-word or two word key phrase. Using these variations of search terms in setting up your website will help you to avoid stuffing your pages with the same keywords and give you the ability to produce more content that is actually “useful”. Ultimately at the end of the day you are not producing the website for yourself or for Google, you are producing the website for the end-user. By developing content that is useful and has relevant keywords sprinkled throughout the content piece, you will obtain a lower bounce rate and a higher conversion rate from the website.

The video that I’ve included in this post is a short example of how to use keywords and keyword phrases throughout your blogging campaign that will complement your search engine optimization campaign.

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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. 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% – 7% 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, or internet marketing 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.

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