Archive for July, 2007
published by Dan in SEO Strategy
1. Continuous keyword tweaking - After your initial keyword research you should continue to monitor which keywords are giving you the most traffic and add relevant keywords that you failed to include in the first place.
2. User feedback - Make sure you provide a way for your viewers to give feedback. This can come in the form of comments or a contact us page. Having both is of course better than just one since people will usually comment on specific videos in the comment page while contacting you for either more information or to complain about something. Encourage people to contact you about their suggestions in order to help you make your video site better. Note that people who give feedback are the type who will take action on your video (like visiting other parts of your site or actually buying something from you).
3. Fresh video content - Though some videos may be really popular don’t rely solely on those videos. If they’re several months old make sure you upload a new video clip or two.
Popularity: 8% [?]
published by Dan in SEO Strategy
Back to online videos. Here are some key strategies to make sure your videos will place well in SERPs.
1. Use very descriptive file names. File names need not be overly long but the important thing is that the file name uses keywords that will describe your video properly. Using a dash in between words work.
2. Aside from the file names make sure you provide plenty of meta data content. This is very important to let the search engine know what the video is all about. Titles and descriptions should be keyword rich. Use both generic and highly specific keywords and phrases in your description.
3. Do keyword research. Since you won’t be using much words (especially if you have a pure video site) then the keywords you use are even more important. Keyword research tools you use for your text will work just as well for video content.
4. If you have a transcript of your video then by all means bundle it with the video to provide even more additional information to spiders. You don’t have to show the ugly transcript to your viewers although for some videos (like speeches) you might want to give viewers the option of downloading a copy of the transcript as well.
5. Include RSS and Atom feeds.
6. Submit your video to the top video search engines today like YouTube, Google Video and Yahoo Video.
Popularity: 9% [?]
published by Dan in Keyword Research
Before I continue with the series of online video optimisation posts I would like to re-tell something that happened a few hours ago reminding me about the importance of keyword research.
A few hours ago, right before writing today’s post my partner and I were discussing future plans. I remembered this great prefab houses I stumbled on the internet about a month back. The problem was I couldn’t remember exactly what it was called. Now I know it sounds dumb but ask anyone who loves to surf the net and you will find that this is a very common problem. People tend to remember website names pretty vaguely, unless your website has a very sticky name that you just can’t help but remember, let alone the website’s URL. This is actually the very reason why search engines is the number one gateway for finding information. People don’t want to have to remember exact phrases or words. It is more convenient to find websites by typing in words or phrases that you know are related to what you are looking for. This is why your website’s keywords are very important.
Now the prefab houses I remembered was (as I now know) called FlatPak. It is actually getting really popular nowadays but I just couldn’t remember it. My point about keywords is that I spent more than an hour searching for it trying various search strings before I found it. The search strings I tried were:
- Packed It House
- Packed House
- Packedhouse
- Prefab Houses
- Prefabricated Houses
- Modular House
- Unique House
In none of these did the FlatPak website rank well. Sure I could just have entered Pack House, which it ranks very well for but the point is that I remembered wrong and ended up finding it through difficult research by the time which my partner has already lost interest and fallen asleep. Lesson learned you may sell great houses but if you have a poor range of keywords in which you place well you will lose customers.
Popularity: 10% [?]
published by Dan in SEO Basics
Last post I discussed the importance of the content and quality of your video. When producing an online video some of the technical aspects you shouldn’t for get to ensure that it is optimised for internet viewers are:
Quantity of data – Find out the maximum file size you can upload before making the video since this will partially determine the quality and length of the video.
Compression – How “good� do you want your video to look? Note that though you might want the best quality compression is really needed so decided how much compression is acceptable to you as a producer. You also need to consider your audience, which is why it is usually best to compress the video file in two or more sizes to give viewers who have slower internet connections a choice.
File format – Again give your viewers a choice. Support different file formats so that more people can view your video. Usual players used are Windows Media and Quicktime so you’d better have file formats viewable by the two players at least. It is also a good idea to make a Flash version.
Length of Video – Online viewers tend to watch shorter clips (those that are about 1 to 3 minutes in length) than longer ones. Of course depending on what your content is, this could be possible or not. So if you have a pretty long video make sure you make short video clips that can serve as teasers. This video clips will be seen by more people and so give exposure for your full-length video. Aside form this the clips can also be submitted to search engines and be considered as different from the longer original video giving you more submissions and chances to place well in SERPs.
Popularity: 9% [?]
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