Using video as part of your marketing plan is a smart move these days. Even smarter is getting the most out of your efforts by applying basic SEO to your YouTube videos.
Like photos on your website, YouTube & Google have limited ability to understand what your video is about unless you tell them. You don’t want to be spammy about it, but you do want to be consistent. Follows is a simple infographic with the basics of YouTube SEO.
If you’re one of the small local businesses trying to move your marketing online, this article is for you. Perhaps you already have a website, a blog, and even a page on Facebook. If you do, great! You’re making progress. Depending on whether you are doing the work yourself or hiring it out, you may have missed the opportunity for some of the best free advertising you can get — listings in some of the larger online directories… the ones that count. (Being in a bazillion small meaningless link-farm directories doesn’t help and you want to stay away from those!)
The biggies:
If you’re a restaurant you should also be in:
Start with your Google listing, then do Bing. Make sure you enter the exact same data for each of them! Entering the data into these sites will be a bit repetitive, but that’s okay. Different search engines serve up results from many different sources and you want to make sure you’re included in the ones that matter. This is a really basic list, there are lots of other good, solid directories, but folks just starting out should worry about these first.
Most of these sites also offer upgraded ‘paid’ listings or other features. For now, just stick with the basic free listing, you can always upgrade later. Ideally these listings will include a link back to a website, but if you don’t have a site, put up a page on Facebook and link to that.
When provided with the opportunity to enter a description about your company, it needs to be well-written sales copy that tells the potential customer what benefits you offer them. Why should they come to YOUR business and not the guy down the street?
Link building must be part of your search engine optimization (SEO) plan. Where content is king on the internet, links are queen. Links back to your site are how the search engines tell whether your content is valuable or not.
While there are many products available on the internet that claim to get you a substantial number of links back to your site, the quality, or lack thereof, may actually be detrimental to your rankings. If your business is a pet store and your links are on a site about vacations in the Bahamas, the search engines consider this a “junk” link and you may actually be penalized in the rankings game.
Some of the software out there that targets other sites for linking is actually quite sophisticated and will only give you results based on specific keywords.
You want to focus on links on sites that have complementary subjects. If you specialize in accessible real estate for handicapped people, a link on a site with other resources for handicapped people is a quality link. If that site has a good page rank on the search engines, then your link is even more valuable.
The anchor text is the actual words on the page that you click on. The anchor text of a link is extremely important, because it’s that text that tells the search engine what your site is about.
For example:
For great information about home staging in Norfolk, click here
Check out this valuable information about home staging in Norfolk.
In these two examples the first one appears to be a link about “click here”, not good at all! The second example is a link about specific keywords. The links should be variations of the keywords you are trying to rank for.
Ideally, the links should also be to various pages on your website and not necessarily the home page. A link to the home page is a link to your site, but a link to a sub-page is a link to your CONTENT.
Focus on getting backlinks to your site with consideration to the source of the link, the content of the link, and the destination of the link.
