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.

News: In November Google rolled out breadcrumbs display in SERPs. The idea is that when a URL for a listing is too long it will be replaced by a breadcrumb, to help a user understand the context of that web page. Google quotes

“Some web addresses help you understand the structure of the site and how the specific page fits into the site hierarchy. For example, consider a search for the biography of Vint Cerf (Google’s Internet Evangelist). The URL for one result, “www.google.com/corporate/execs.html,” shows that the page is located in a page about “execs,” under “corporate,” which is on the “google.com” site. This can provide valuable context when deciding whether to click on the result.

Often, however, URLs are too long, too short, or too obscure to add useful information.“

Tutorial : This week we are going to look at the importance of internal linking for both usability and search engine optimisation. We have put together an example together that distributes a set of keywords throughout a simple 3 page website.

References:

http://www.crearecommunications.co.uk/examples/internal-linking.html

Script:

News - This weeks news feature is the sneaky peak at Google’s new search layout.

We think that the new layout will possible be released along side the caffeine algorithm update in the new year, to create a bit of publicity.

Its pretty simple and we’ll show you have to do it now.

Tutorial - This week we are going to look at headings and heading structure for SEO.

The key thing to remember when formatting headings is that heading values vary from <h1> through to <h6> and a heading within a page should denote the importance of the piece of information that the headings heads up.

We have made an example page on the blog which you can see here.

It is good practice to have your headings run throughout your page with hierarchy of importance.

As you can see my heading 1 represents my main keywords and is consisted with the page title I have chosen to optimise this page for.

Then you can see I have my secondary headings running down the page in order. The secondary headings are a good opportunity to include some keyword that are related to your main keyword for the current page.

You can have more than one heading 2 to represent multiple pieces of information of similar importance. This is consistent with all heading values.

Now, To contradict myself slightly you can have headings that don’t run down the page in order if relevant. As you can see in this example the heading structure can be as follows:

<h1> Heading

<h2> Sub Heading

<h3> Sub Sub Heading

<h2> Sub Heading

Thanks for watching.

Resources:

• http://gizmodo.com/5412801/how-to-try-the-new-google-search
• Heading Example 1
• Heading Example 2

News : Keyword User Interface, this provides a list a specific keywords that Google has found while indexing your site. Google claim this is excellent for finding out if specific sites have been hacked and your site has started to appear for random keywords. Buy clicking the keyword, you get a list of URL’s that the keyword appears on.

We think it also allows you to see whether a particular phrase you are optimising for has been optimised to the full potential and more importantly that Google recognizes that the keyword is related to your site.

Tutorial: Webmaster tools tips

That are worth analysing are:

• Top search queries
• Crawl errors
• Links to your site
• Keywords
• HTML suggestions - Duplicate Meta data

Showcase: This weeks showcase is SEO Spyglass link analysis tool, you can find the free demo at http://www.link-assistant.com/seo-spyglass/. We will have a look into this more in next weeks tutorial.

News - In a recent blog from Google’s web master help blog, low quality backward links are mentioned and how to deal with them. Google mentions being part of a bad community and whether this could essentially lead to a negative effect in your search engine results positions.

We have always been under the impression that low quality bad links are essentially worthless rather than them actually effecting your sites listings, the reason we believed this because otherwise webmasters could quite easily savatage a competitor. Google backs this up by essentially saying that link building is on of many variables taken into Google’s algorithm and for webmasters no to worry.

Tutorial - Google Insights, we will look at the following sections:

• location
• time scales
• predicted search volume
• regional interest
• top related search terms
• rising search terms
• issues (Data centers)

Showcase - Cufon font replacement, plug web design blog tutorial. We will expand more in the web design video blog, how to use the cufon font replacement method. We also think that the search engines will be fine with the process as the cached version of a page looks as it should with 1 version of the font, it also claims to be SEO friendly.

Question - IP address question.

VIDEO SCRIPT

Hello and Welcome to Creare’s SEO Video Blog.
At the moment Nick is on holiday so I will be filling in for him this week. My name is Pete Campbell and I’m one of the Search Engine Optimisation Consultants and Web Designers here at Creare.

Twitter, the immensely popular micro-blogging website, can be an engaging resource and fantastic marketing tool for any website. It enables you to directly target and appeal to your visitors alongside effectively contributing towards building your websites brand.

Today, I’m going to talk about how to optimize your websites twitter profile so that it gains maximum exposure, gains you more followers and ultimately drives potential customers or visitors back to your website.

BUILD A COMPREHENSIVE PROFILE
Firstly, ensure your profile appropriately represents your business or website. If you haven’t already, set your name, website address, one line biography and your location within the settings panel.
Next, customise your profile design by navigating to the ‘Design’ tab. Twitter allows you to set any custom background image, alongside the individual styles and HTML colours for each element.

Branding is an important element of any website, and within Twitter you can carry yours across quite simply.

SYNC YOUR RSS FEED
Using Twitterfeed, you can sync up your websites RSS feed so that it automatically updates your Twitter profile everytime you make a news update.

Twitterfeed is a free service and is available at:
http://www.twitterfeed.com/

All you have to do is register and provide Twitterfeed with your Twitter Account & RSS Feed details. In true Blue Peter fashion, here is an account I setup earlier.

In your account you can customize the ways in which your RSS updates will be published to your Twitter profile.
We’d suggest setting your post content to publish the news titles and a frequency of one hour to ensure your profile is always up-to-date. You can also set prefixs, suffixs and even a keyword filter.

ADD A TWITTER WIDGET TO YOUR WEBSITE
Twitter offers several types of widgets or ‘badges’ that allow you to easily display & embed your latest tweets onto your own website.

Find these by logging into your Twitter account and navigating to the ‘Goodies’ link within the footer. Choose the option called ‘Widget’ and select the type of Widget you are looking for, in our case, you first need to pick ‘My Website’ option and then ‘Profile Widget’ option.

Within here, you will find an easy-to-use wizard that allows you to customize and define the look and feel of your chosen Twitter widget and also give you instructions on how you can simply embed it within your website.

For a more in-depth tutorial on how to add Twitter to your Website, check out my recent blog post on the Creare Design website, which I’ve linked to in the YouTube description.

TWEETING TIPS
Lastly, here are some tips on how you can maintain an engaging and resourceful Twitter profile.

• Encourage Conversation: Pose questions to your followers, this will gain you @ tweets back and drive attention to your profile
• Offer Unique Insights: Show you’re the expert of your industry, offers tips of the trade. On the Creare Group Twitter we often update with Web Design & SEO tips for example.
• Follow Influential People in your Industry: This will help gain you more followers, tweet the people you follow, say hello and they may even tweet back, giving your account even more exposure.

Overall, if you have a Twitter profile, you should be encouraged to use it as an active resource to gain feedback off your visitors or customers. Simply put, you should consider it as a vital extension of your website, business or brand.

Feel free to visit and follow our Twitter Profile at:
http://www.twitter.com/crearegroup

Thanks for watching!

Script:

Nick - Welcome to our SEO Video Blog, This week I am joined by my colleague Amelia while James is on holiday and today we are going to discuss SEO vs Usability. Amelia has experience in this field so it will be good to get her input.

Amelia - We are going to discuss the various aspects of a web page that a user sees while browsing a website and how SEO can effect this.

Nick - The problem starts when a webmaster or SEO tries to over optimise a page, meaning they try and add too many phrases. Cramming keywords can confuse your users and search engines.

Amelia - Search engines are designed to provide their users with the best possible search result. The content reflected on the web page must be related to the initial search query and be of a high standard. Nick and James mentioned ‘the basics of SEO’ on a previous video which discusses some simple SEO practices to gain success in popular search engines.

Nick - The initial contact that your user has with your site is usually the page title and meta description that is displayed in the search result, a meta description is an opportunity to attract potential users by writing something descriptive and relevant, where as your page title should be related to the search query.

Amelia - Then, once your user is on the page, the headings will be the first thing they look for. Be consistent with your SEO. This should be relatively simple and if you have done your research when picking keywords the distribution should fit naturally to your website.

Nick - The imagery of you site should again be consistent with your service or products and ensure that you include honest and descriptive alternative tags, This vergers onto accessibility which we will leave for another video blog.

Amelia - Copy -  your copy should be related and well written. It should be short, snappy and to the point. It should also include ways of emphasising keywords, with strong tags (which makes text Bold) and secondary headings. You can also offer more information to the user through the use of anchored text, making sure the links land on pages that can further their reading.

Nick - Once a user is done reading a page, they then will look to move on, so a clear, obvious and concise navigation is vital. It also should be before the fold and be made using unordered or ordered lists (bullet points).

Amelia - We have linked our example page on the Creare Communications blog post at www.crearecommunications.co.uk/news, please feel free to add any comments to the blog post, thanks for watching.

Resource Links:

http://www.crearecommunications.co.uk/tutorials/seo-vs-usability/