Embracing this bold new world can pay dividends to your SEO campaign

While search engine spiders won’t pick up on optimisation within a video itself, they can identify a range of text-based content that is associated with it. With the continued rise of YouTube – 999,987,865 videos and counting – it is easy to see why the industry is starting to wake up to the SEO possibilities of web video.

While it may be most famous for being home to videos of dancing dogs and skateboarding cats, YouTube also hosts an array of videos that offer expert opinion and analysis on related topics. As seen with my colleagues James and Nick’s SEO video blogs, they can generate significant traffic and stimulate debate among the audience. And with a transcript of the video in text form present as well as backward links to the mother site will also enable excellent search engine optimisation possibilities.

It is important to note however there are alternatives to YouTube in the videosphere. Social networks such as Twitter, Facebook and MySpace are still growing at an alarming rate, and also allow users to embed videos, alongside sites such as Twiddeo (Twitter’s sister site) and Vimeo. If the video is considered useful or has a certain X Factor it may even be shared between a web community for even wider exposure, which can spread like wild fire around the globe.

But remember to always add the video to your own site before uploading it elsewhere, to ensure your site gets the authority.

Linking provides another opportunity to maximise your SEO strategy from video content. Uploading to video sharing networks enables backward linking to your own website, which is particularly useful if the video you shoot is informative and entertaining - which will engage the audience and improve the likelihood of traffic being redirected.

Any HTML content surrounding a video, such as a transcript of the content for example, can represent one way of optimising. Even a word-for-word script can utilise extensive key phrasing. Ensure filenames, titles and video descriptions are key word rich, as well as always tagging videos with phrases incorporating these terms as well.

An XML or video sitemap on your own website will also generate activity within the search engines. Submitting the sitemap via Webmaster Tools will help the engines discover material they otherwise wouldn’t.

Don’t delay in harnessing the power of video in your SEO campaign. This bold new world offers a wealth of opportunities.

During the Summer Google made an announcement about a new project they are rolling out, they call it ‘Caffeine’. Caffeine is described as a re-write of the current search architecture, Matt Cutts suggested that many searches would stay the same but be faster.

At the time of this announcement, Matt Cutts discussed this new update with WebProNews. He suggested that it is very similar to the “Big daddy Update” from 2005, and consists of changes to the way Google crawls and then indexes sites.

Before Christmas, Google were kind enough to reassure everyone that Caffeine wouldn’t be rolled out until after the festivities. This was a very considerate thing of Google to do, especially as the Christmas period is often the busiest time of year for many businesses.

In November Google told us all about their intentions at PubCon. A few days ago Matt Cutts posted a video of his presentation at this event on his blog. It is well worth watching – if you want to skip ahead to the Caffeine bit though, it starts at around 22.10.

How will Caffeine affect your SEO

If you use white hat SEO techniques, and make sure your site is excellent for the end user (ie people) then you can’t really go wrong. Don’t forget to make sure your content is regularly updated, your coding is clean and tidy, and you link build using ethical and thoughtful techniques you can’t go wrong. The basic rules of SEO still apply!

Yesterday, Matt Cutts blogged about an official Google post on synonyms by Google engineer, Steven Baker, and how they affect search results. I find this a very interesting subject, and one that is clearly very relevant for SEO.

The fact that Google can understand many synonyms, I find amazing, because as Steven Baker states:

“An irony of computer science is that tasks humans struggle with can be performed easily by computer programs, but tasks humans can perform effortlessly remain difficult for computers.”

The tasks that computers find difficult are the understanding of the nuances of language. The English language, like all languages, has many subtleties that as humans we can understand effortlessly. Many of our words have more than one meaning, where the context in which they are placed makes all the difference to our understanding of them.

Steven Baker used the example of ‘pictures’ and ‘photos’ meaning the same thing within certain contexts. Google has the ability to understand that these two very different words can mean the same thing, and I think Google are right to be proud of such an achievement.

How does this affect SEO?

Well, the advice from Google has always been to use synonyms where possible. You should think about other terms, such as slang, for the same word and use those within your text as much as you can to ensure your copy is relevant for as many searches as possible. Where one person may call a USB drive a ‘flash drive’ and another may call it a ‘thumb drive’ you will need to make sure that both these terms are present on your page in order to be successful.

You shouldn’t just cram these words into your content, but make it read as naturally as possible, because there is nothing worse than clumsy, keyword stuffed text. You should always have your end users at the forefront of your mind when composing text for online consumption. So, make your text readable but include synonyms where possible, to ensure you get the best from your content.

Script:

Hi and welcome to this weeks SEO video blog, we are going to take a quick look at link building and in particular what to look out for when asked to pay for links on other webmasters sites.

Firstly tho, a bit of news. You might have seen the count down on Google when you clicked ‘I’m feeling lucky’ button, well after all the talk about it counting down to a new Google release or something exciting within the industry, it turned out to be a bit of a gimmick.

- video -

Very festive!

When thinking about buying links, it is important that you are very careful. Google can easily identify paid links, potentially leading to negative effects towards your SEO campaign.

So a few things to look out for when buying links are as follows:

Firstly, domain authority. Page Rank (PR) is a good way of seeing what sort of authority the domain has in the eyes of Google, it may also be worth looking at domain age and site performance.

Secondly, related content. When link building it is important that the sites content reflects your businesses keywords and SEO campaign, this will look more natural to Google.

Third, outbound links. If the site you are considering is littered with links already and covered in advertisements, it is probable that Google is already aware of this and it will have potentially lost some authority.

Fourth, quality content. Content is king, Good quality content is vital, so take some time to read through the text and make sure it isn’t full of spammy text and internal links.

Fifth, index depth. Small sites can only hold so much information, so a site with a larger search index can hold more related content, which can help to build the authority of a domain and increase the value of a link from this site.

I hope this mini list has been of some help, remember that when building backward links you should always consider quality over quantity.

Thanks for watching, please leave any questions or comments on the youtube channel or supporting blog post.

Yesterday’s WebProNews Video is all about duplicate content, and it got me thinking. We all know duplicate content isn’t a good thing, and this video drew my attention with the title: “How to Avoid Duplicate Content”. Shari Thurow of Omni Marketing Interactive gives some interesting and straightforward advice about how to avoid duplicate content.

The first thing that struck me was her assertion that you must ‘be proactive’ and ‘be consistent’ – this is such common sense advice that I can immediately see the merit in it. The advice to be consistent with your information architecture makes perfect sense to me too, by ensuring that you follow a logical and consistent structure to your sites you can ensure that they will not only be easier to crawl, but you can also lead the search engine to crawl the pages you want them to. This leads nicely to the third point from Thurow – “Link consistently to the same URLs” – if you link to the shortest, most keyword rich URL then you are giving the search engines the best URL and don’t forget this is also the one your visitors will want too.

You should always send consistent messages to the search engines regarding which pages they should index, because they will undoubtedly choose the wrong file to show in the SERPs.

Thurow makes the point that one could upload several files with almost identical content, but with the use of CSS these pages can look totally different to one another, (CSS Zen Garden is a prime example of this), a human visitor can look at the pages and see that they look different, but the search engine only has the html code to go on. So the search engine uses the only information they have available and class the pages as duplicate content. You should make sure that each page on your website has content that is dramatically different, as this is the only way to avoid falling into the duplicate content trap.

Thurow goes on to say that the canonical tag is both a blessing and a curse. It is a curse because SEO spammers regularly abuse it. It is a blessing when used correctly, and for the purpose it was designed for, it allows users to filter CMS sites easily, which you’ll appreciate is a blessing in itself.

Takeaway

So, to avoid duplicate content, the very best thing you can do is apply your common sense, look at your site logically and be consistent and proactive. Give the search engines as much information and help as you can and they will index the pages you want them to index. At all costs, avoid giving the search engines conflicting information though, as this will only result in disaster.