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.
Whether your are blogging or developing another type of website, the basics to SEO remain the same:
The trick, of course, is doing all that optimization to make the search engines happy, and still having a site that looks and reads well to your human audience.
I’m not an expert at SEO, in fact I’m still a student. I’m taking an online class that came as a part of my purchase of a great software package called WebCEO. It’s fairly comprehensive and has really been great in helping me optimize my own business web site as well as some client sites. They have a FREE version, which is fully functioning; it just doesn’t have some of the advanced features that the professional version contains. Check it out when you get a chance! WebCEO
This barely scratches the surface of SEO. Entire articles can be written on just about each element I’ve mentioned, and we’ll get to that… all in good time.
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.
