Social SEO and You Part 4 – Video Origination

Please welcome Brandon back for the last installment of his Social SEO and you series (post 1 and post 2  and post 3) - it’s been super information and I’ve learned a lot.  Please leave any questions you might have in the comments, I know he’d love to answer them, and follow him on Twitter - he’s a great guy!

Brandon is a consultant, business marketing grad, strategist, house music junkie, avid reader, speaker, and coffee fiend. He likes to make and break stuff, currently working in the Light Apps division at Corel and the CEO of his own start-up Incentify.

You can find him @BrandonWaselnuk

Video tagging is a very complicated space right now. With the advent of Apple’s iPhone 4S and Siri there’s been a lot of conversation around schema tags. (Yea they just like to come up with fun new words) I’m going to do my best to hit the high level topics you’ll actually care about and be able to implement right now. For more details (like the Technical Considerations section) you can download the slide deck or ask me any questions in the comments/email/call/carrier pigeon?

How do videos get more SEO?

Here are some quick and easy ways to make discovering your video a bit more likely:

• Make tags relevant and use a lot. When it comes to tags it’s always bad news if you use fake tags, in fact it usually makes search engines index you with a ‘nofollow’ meaning; no search. So don’t go saying it’s a Justin Bieber video unless it is k?


• Try to use consistent tagging across all videos, this helps aggregators. Also; using adjectives in those tags is a good idea


• Match your titles and descriptions to tags


• Don’t use natural language in tags (don’t waste space on words like ‘such, and, or, to’)

SEO on YouTube

A huge number of people stick to YouTube, ain’t nothing wrong with that! So here are some tips and tricks when you’re dealing with this huge player in the video space:

• Use this Keyword Research tool as the first step in finding relevant tags for your video. (Yes, Justin Bieber was searched 13,516,800 times this month)


• As discussed above, Tags are the only way for search engines (other than special ones like Blinkx) to find your video. Also; consider dropping the URL to your homepage in the description so you can get some backlinks


• Use the ability to set the thumbnail image of your video, make it something compelling so users want to click your video. A picture is worth… screw it sex sells, just look at Ray William Johnson; his stills are always some celebrity looking scandalous or something


• Allow comments, haters gonna hate so just let it go


• Embed your video on your website to help transfer traffic and views


• Share over social media channels! (Obvious right? Sorry…:) )

Places to host your Video

Amateur Sites to use:

• YouTube


• Google Video


• MySpace Video


• Yahoo! Video


• AOL Video


• DailyMotion


• MetaCafe


• Revver


• Giant cheat sheet here (Please note, though extensive this page was written in 2007 some services may no longer exist, I’ve just never found a better list with links and criteria)

Submission to Video Searching sites:

• AOL Video http://video.aol.com/


• Or you can use a Media RSS (MRSS) feed to submit content hosted elsewhere (This Media RSS feed would exist on your webpage, so it would drive traffic back to your website)


• Blinkx – Use this form to ask for submission to the database


• Yahoo! – Use this form for submission

It’s been a Pleasure

This brings to a close my guest blog series for the wonderful Lara Wellman. I hope you got some great information and took something useful away rather than just wasted like 3 minutes of your life. I know I had fun writing these articles, I always have more fun carrying on conversations so come see me on twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or in the comments.

Social SEO and You Part 3 – Twitter

 I’m thrilled to have Brandon back for part three of his Social SEO and You guest post series (post 1 and post 2), this time about Twitter. Enjoy!

Brandon is a consultant, business marketing grad, strategist, house music junkie, avid reader, speaker, and coffee fiend. He likes to make and break stuff, currently working in the Light Apps division at Corel and the CEO of his own start-up Incentify.

You can find him @BrandonWaselnuk

I want to start this post with a nice be caveat, Twitter and SEO are a pretty big unknown for the most part, there’s lots of news/research/posts that both say Twitter does and does not help your SEO. Therefore this post will cover the areas in which there are some pretty proven facts on it helping your website’s SEO as well as a lot around how to help your ‘Twitter SEO’ meaning – Helping you get found on Twitter, which will help you personally lead people to your site.

Key Factors

Here are three quick facts on Twitter and how it relates to SEO:

• The more @replys you get to a tweet, the higher your SEO – Now the debate is on whether this just helps that tweet become more relevant in Twitter (proven fact) and if it also helps the link inside that tweet (unknown at this point)


• The more retweets you get, the higher your SEO – Same rules as above


• Make your Bio Count – This is a huge deal, it’s not only how you represent yourself to others but it also plays a pretty big role in SEO, Google actually indexes your bio. Therefore if someone Googles your name it’s very likely you’re Twitter will pop up and they get that bio blurb, it’ll also help your website (if you link to that in your bio) etc.

How to Create Success

A lot of you who are good with Twitter will recognize most of these points, they are simple yet many overlook these easy guidelines sometimes.

• Allow for ‘Quote retweeting’, try to keep tweets to 120 characters to allow, basically when people want to add their own message on your tweet. Eg. “Amazing graphs! RT: @blah….”


• Use Link shorteners such as Hootsuite and Bit.ly for metric tracking and to reduce character spend


• Above all be ‘real’; twitter is a giant conversation so be conversational, you wouldn’t want a dude on the street wearing a sandwich board to offer you a flier with coupons? So don’t do it in Twitter


• Use appropriate hashtags (#awesome) for reach expansion, but don’t get crazy with them!


• Get out and help others, retweet them, respond to them, they’ll pay it back


• Try to spread tweets out over the day, often tweet just never ‘bulk tweet’ (5 posts at the same time for example)


• Promote Blog sites as it’s an easy glide path for twitter users, from short conversations to longer opinions where they can still comment and engage

Build ‘Followers’, Links, and PageRank

Twitter internally links your followers to your profile; therefore higher PageRank followers give your page a boost as well. Meaning, if you have high clout big names on Twitter following you, it’ll boost you in the process. FYI PageRank is basically Google’s term for the spot at which your page shows up in a Google search.

Thanks a Ton

I hope this helps you out a bit and I love questions so if you have any please leave them in the comments and I’ll answer to the best of my abilities!

Social media seo guidelines

View more presentations from Lara Wellman

Social SEO and You – Part 2

Image via CrunchBase

I’m thrilled to welcome Brandon for part two about Search Engine Optimization.  If you missed his first post, check it out here.

Brandon is a consultant, business marketing grad, strategist, house music junkie, avid reader, speaker, and coffee fiend. He likes to make and break stuff, currently working in the Light Apps division at Corel and the CEO of his own start-up Incentify.

You can find him @BrandonWaselnuk

SEO in Facebook Posts

Facebook is a wonderful platform that almost every business has taken to. It has many benefits and few drawbacks; one of those benefits is boosting your SEO ‘juice’ as some cool kids would say.
When looking at your Facebook posts there’s two pretty big questions most ask when thinking about SEO:

• How do Facebook Posts get SEO?


• How do I Increase the odds of Feedback on my Posts?

How do Facebook Posts get SEO?

The first step in getting any SEO on your Facebook posts is to make sure they are flagged as ‘Public’ posts. Anything that isn’t can never get SEO as they are closed behind the firewall basically.

The More a Post is Shared

Any post you make now has the ability of being shared (and you can track who shared it!) the more people who decide to share the more SEO that post gets. Remember though, it’s a pretty drastically high amount of sharing you require if you’re hoping for your post to show up on a Google search, however if someone is doing a Facebook search, they can come across your Page rather than a competitor if your content is more often shared.
Note: The idea of getting someone to share your posts is simple but difficult in practice. A few tips and tricks are to think like your readers, what would make them enact the need to share what you’ve said with their friends? Also consider the ‘selfish sharing’ factor, something I got from Scott Stratten (unMarketing) it’s the idea that people share things that are important to them, regardless of whether they think all their friends will care. So connect with the individual in your posts if at all possible.

The More Comments and Likes a Post Receives

The more commenting you get the higher your SEO, it’s pretty basic. Much like above, it’s all about giving your readers a reason to engage with you, think like them, what’s a good conversation piece?

How Do I Increase the Odds of Feedback on my Posts?

These are two simple rules to consider, on top of the tips above, but definitely help when you’re thinking about making your posts count.

Increase the ‘Awesome’

Better content means more feedback, engagement, sharing and more, not frequency. There’s no equation for awesome unfortunately so it’s up to you and your understanding of your market, what’s awesome to them? Find it and talk about it to help give your page the boost it needs.

Note: Consider looking at competition for the ‘angle’ they are taking, you can pretty easily see by the number of fans they have VS. The comments and likes a post gets what their feedback % is. Then you have a benchmark to work against.

Ask Questions

Asking open ended questions is usually a really great way to get your audience engaging with you. You can stimulate conversation from there and start to learn who in your audience is really connected to what issues (worldly, work related, or other depending on your page’s function).

E.g. ‘The newest article from SEOMOZ (a popular SEO blog) talks about Google+ implications to SEO. What are your thoughts on all this G+ news lately?’

It’s Too Long

Again, I think that’s enough of a run through some SEO for one blog post. I hope you’ve enjoyed the discussion on Facebook and I’d love to answer any questions you may have, so please comment and/or send them my way!

Social SEO and You

I met Brandon this summer at Social Capital. He’s a wealth of information and I’m thrilled that he’s agreed to do a guest series on the blog about social SEO. Enjoy!

Brandon is a consultant, business marketing grad, strategist, house music junkie, avid reader, speaker, and coffee fiend. He likes to make and break stuff, currently working in the Light Apps division at Corel and the CEO of his own start-up Incentify.

You can find him @BrandonWaselnuk

***

 

Many people have heard of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) especially when starting a new business/blog/website (or all of the above) but not many know how easy it can be to get started with SEO.
The focus of this post is to look at Social Media and how it can affect your SEO positively with easy techniques anyone can use to get a little extra out of their content and efforts.
There are four main sections that we’ll take a look at:

• Basic SEO principles


• Facebook Posts


• Twitter


• Video

In order to give you a portable asset I’ve built a power point presentation you can download at the bottom of the post with all of the content.

Basic SEO Principles

Starting with the absolute basics is always the best way to get your head in the SEO game. What most of you probably intuitively know is: in social media people share content that is awesome. So the more awesome you can put into your content, the more likely it’ll get shard, leading to increased SEO for the source you linked back to.
What some of you might not know is this quick list on some easy SEO tips.

Linking in posts

When you reference a book in your post, link to that book, the more outbound links you have the better your SEO according to Google. Remember though, you don’t want to send your potential clients/readers away from your site too often, so use sparingly and always make the link open in a new window.

Using tags effectively

When you finish a post you can always add tags to it that help others know what it’s about. This is also catalogued by Google and used when people search something with those keywords you used as tags. Remember that ‘stuffing’ (adding fake keywords you know are being searched) actually reduces your SEO, so don’t tag Justin Bieber randomly! Unless, you know, you’re actually writing about him.

Use a Site Tree for ‘crawling’

When you develop a website you have the ability of keeping an accessible site tree for users to navigate around with rather than just letting them browse via buttons. It’s really good idea to have it for more than just your readers though, Google spiders crawl site trees far more easily than without which actually ups your SEO.

Use Keyword (Google trends will help you!)

Identifying the keywords that your target audience is using is a pretty big endeavour (and a whole series of blog posts on its own) but if you have some then try to make sure you use them throughout your web pages. Just be really careful not to overload on them, if you pass a certain threshold (sources say that’s anywhere from 6%-15% of this word existing compared to other words) your SEO decreases as Google thinks you’re cheating.

Use keywords in Page Titles and URL links

If you have one keyword that’s the most searched, its best if that’s included directly in the Page title and URL link. Imagine you’re writing a post on a new iPhone App, you would want iPhone and App in your URL as it’s an incredibly highly searched term compared to ‘pumpkin’ or ‘cell phone’ for example.

Use phrases and words people will search for

Something that’s difficult to think of at first is: “How will a potential reader find my site?” I could bet they aren’t typing in your name (unless you’re doing marketing around that) but more than likely searching on your area of expertise, that’s where you want your keywords to be so that they can find you. Example: I’m a business strategist and really love helping clients make strategic plans from social media to product launches. It’s rare that someone will Google Brandon Waselnuk as I’m young and just starting my career. I know though that they are probably searching “Benchmarks for Product Roadmaps” so I should author a post around that and fill it with other great keywords!

That’s all for now

It’s a heavy set of information I’ve just brain dumped on you and you’re probably itching to try out some of the tips and tricks. So at this point I’ll recommend you download the slide deck and at your leisure read through the rest of the content.

You can also check back about a week from now and I’ll have written on the next major topic, Facebook Posts and SEO.

Social media seo guidelines

View more presentations from Lara Wellman

Before you go though, let me know if you like  this format in the comments, and as always if you have any questions I’d be happy to answer them.