Best Video SEO Tactics

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When it comes to video SEO, it’s no secret that a lot of us are somewhat in the dark, and understandably so — Google and other search engines can’t crawl the frame-by-frame, visual contents of a video (not yet, anyway), so how is it possible to optimize video content for crawlers? Admittedly, this is a tricky situation.

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But while it’s true that search engines simply don’t have the processing power necessary to crawl every frame of every video everywhere (how incredible would that be, though?), this doesn’t mean that there are no viable SEO tactics for video content. In fact, following are a few of the more popular strategies to boost the SERP of any site through their video content.

Explore Your Hosting Options

While hosting your video on YouTube may be a great way to rack up views (it is the second largest search engine, after all), that doesn’t make it the best place to always host your videos. Simply put: If the keywords you are targeting cause video results to turn up in the search results, then you should not host your video on YouTube. Instead, you should host it on your own site, because then a successful SEO campaign will lead to your site-hosted video showing up among the videos on the SERP.

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Another thing to consider is that the number of views a video receives on YouTube rarely transfers into associated website traffic. Therefore, if your main goal is to drive more traffic to your website, it would be worth your while to host the video on your own site. With that in mind, if you do end up wanting your video on your site instead of YouTube, keep in mind that you don’t necessarily have to host the video yourself. For instance, there are plenty of video hosting services out there (Wistia, among others) that will not only let you embed the video, but they will go further by providing you with a video XML sitemap, ultimately attributing ownership of the video to your site.

Use a Video XML Sitemap

As explained above, if you’d like your video hosted on your site as opposed to YouTube, you’ll want to create an XML sitemap and submit it in Google Search Console.

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However, it’s important to note that this XML sitemap will not impact your rankings directly — it will only indirectly serve your rankings by allowing your video to link back to your site. Also, keep in mind that some video-hosting services will generate and provide a video XML sitemap for you as a common courtesy.

Alter Your Embed Code

Altering your embed code is pretty straightforward if you’re trying to increase your video’s SERP. In short, all you’ll really need to do is edit the embed code so that it looks like this:

“<center><p> (Embed code provided by YouTube or Wistia goes here) Video by <a href=“(Your website URL goes here)/”> (Your name goes here) </a></p></center>”

By doing this, you’ll greatly improve the potential of your site’s SEO efforts, since you’ll end up getting a link out of your video.

Things to Keep in Mind

While these little fixes can go a long way, when you’re trying to implement SEO tactics into your video content, there are always a few critical things to always keep in mind. Most importantly, you should remember that at the end of the day, keyword research is the name of the game — by performing extensive keyword research for your video, you can only help the success of your SEO campaign.

Also, it’s worth considering exporting your video to HD, since videos exported in HD tend to perform better than those that aren’t. And if you’re especially dedicated, you may want to try transcribing your video and posting the transcription in the video’s description, since search engines have no idea about the content of the video unless you tell them exactly what’s in it. By transcribing your video, you have another pathway to boost your video’s SEO presence.

SEO After Panda Updates Till Sep 2012

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It is a tough job getting to the top of the search engines and an even tougher job to stay atop the leading search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo. Google’s ever changing algorithm does not help either. Here is a quick SEO infograph with a few tips for you.

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Is SEO For Business Really Needed?

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seo for businessSEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and it is a series of actions one has to take in order to help a website earn better positions in the search results pages. Any website owner should be aware that more than 75% of internet users never check out search engine results other than the top ten ones that appear on the first page. This is why SEO for business websites is not optional. It has to be done even from the early stages of building the website. It should be part of the marketing strategy for any business that wants to be found online.

Why Isn’t Search Engine Marketing Enough?

Some internet marketers may say that SEO is a waste of time. It is much faster to setup and run a search marketing campaign which could bring you prospects and customers from the very first minute you got it up and running.

While this is true, we shouldn’t forget that search engine marketing campaigns bring you customers only for as long as you keep putting money into them. The moment your campaign stops, nobody will ever knock on your door again until you open your wallet once more. This is where SEO for business websites wins the battle: on long term, once you got good results, there’s a big probability that your pages will keep on ranking for a while without you having to do anything to maintain them there. You invest a lot of time and perhaps money in the beginning, but your investment pays off later on, when you may cross difficult periods, yet clients will still come from organic search, allowing you to stay in business.

How To Integrate SEO into the Marketing Mix?

Whenever you develop your marketing plans, it’s best to start with a budget split between the main activities you intend to do. One of them should be SEO, so you definitely need to have a budget for it, even if it won’t bring you a single dollar in the first 6 months or so. Business owners who want to succeed can’t rely on short term plans and tactics only. They need to have a vision for the future, they need to integrate long term strategies in their plans, so that they can maintain a steady and profitable growth.

How to Start Doing SEO for an Old Business Website?

If the website is new, it’s easy to hire an SEO consultant to help you build your pages in accordance to best practices in the industry.

If, on the contrary, your website is already up and running since years ago but you never considered SEO for business websites a necessity, you may need to change the structure and the information you made available, in order to make it more relevant for search engines.

The last but not least, to keep in mind: SEO is an ongoing long process, so you should never stop doing it. There’s always something to do and to adjust, but you need to monitor your positions permanently and fine-tune your actions accordingly.

Tips For Effective SEO Article Writing

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article writingWhen you write an article, you want as many people as possible to read it. Understanding the basic principles of SEO article writing will help you to create interesting content which will be enjoyed by your readers, and which will rank well within the search engines.

The Importance Of Keywords In Good SEO

The way in which search engines evaluate the keyword content of articles has changed in recent years. Stuffing a webpage with keywords will no longer ensure you a first page ranking – in fact, it is more likely that overstuffing will consign you to the bottom of the listings. However, that is not to say that keywords are not still one of the key components of effective SEO.

For a webpage to rank, the search engine must first know what the article is about, and then whether the page is more relevant and interesting to the searcher than any other available article. Therefore, using relevant keywords will help with your article being designated as relevant. There are plenty of tools available which can help you to research what terms are being searched for, and it is good to include several key terms rather than repeating just one keyword throughout your article. This is because modern search algorithms rely on latent semantic indexing, which identifies whether commonly associated phrases are being used together in an article.

Why Good SEO Means Writing For Your Audience

Although you need to be mindful of what keywords and phrases you are including in an article, you also need to remember that your readers’ experience is important too. Search engine algorithms are improving all the time, and the focus is on delivering results which benefit the reader. In the long term, you want to ensure that you are ahead of the game by offering the highest quality articles.

There are off-page factors to consider in SEO too, such as how many people are talking about or sharing your web content. If your articles are purely written to appeal to search engine robots then the chances of your visitors linking to your articles from their own websites or social media is very low. Good content will also raise the page rank of your website over time, which will have some bearing on where your articles rank.

How Having A Niche Improves SEO

If you are publishing articles on a website or blog, it can be very helpful if the majority of your writing is on a common theme. A good article will be given even more credibility by the search engines if it is published on a website which is considered an authority in the niche. Focusing your articles on a broad subject is a simple way to establish yourself as an expert. If you have varied interests, split your articles over several websites.

Unique Content Boosts Search Engine Rankings

Search engines can identify duplicate content very easily. That is not to say that is impossible to rank a non-unique article, but it is significantly more difficult. To boost your search engine rankings, prioritize original content on your websites.

When it comes to effective SEO article writing, interesting and relevant content will yield the best results.