Embracing this bold new world can pay dividends to your SEO campaign

While search engine spiders won’t pick up on optimisation within a video itself, they can identify a range of text-based content that is associated with it. With the continued rise of YouTube – 999,987,865 videos and counting – it is easy to see why the industry is starting to wake up to the SEO possibilities of web video.

While it may be most famous for being home to videos of dancing dogs and skateboarding cats, YouTube also hosts an array of videos that offer expert opinion and analysis on related topics. As seen with my colleagues James and Nick’s SEO video blogs, they can generate significant traffic and stimulate debate among the audience. And with a transcript of the video in text form present as well as backward links to the mother site will also enable excellent search engine optimisation possibilities.

It is important to note however there are alternatives to YouTube in the videosphere. Social networks such as Twitter, Facebook and MySpace are still growing at an alarming rate, and also allow users to embed videos, alongside sites such as Twiddeo (Twitter’s sister site) and Vimeo. If the video is considered useful or has a certain X Factor it may even be shared between a web community for even wider exposure, which can spread like wild fire around the globe.

But remember to always add the video to your own site before uploading it elsewhere, to ensure your site gets the authority.

Linking provides another opportunity to maximise your SEO strategy from video content. Uploading to video sharing networks enables backward linking to your own website, which is particularly useful if the video you shoot is informative and entertaining – which will engage the audience and improve the likelihood of traffic being redirected.

Any HTML content surrounding a video, such as a transcript of the content for example, can represent one way of optimising. Even a word-for-word script can utilise extensive key phrasing. Ensure filenames, titles and video descriptions are key word rich, as well as always tagging videos with phrases incorporating these terms as well.

An XML or video sitemap on your own website will also generate activity within the search engines. Submitting the sitemap via Webmaster Tools will help the engines discover material they otherwise wouldn’t.

Don’t delay in harnessing the power of video in your SEO campaign. This bold new world offers a wealth of opportunities.

Script:

- Nick -

Welcome to this weeks SEO video blog, you often see articles and companies asking this simple question, what returns the better investment, organic search engine optimisation or pay per click advertisements?

- James -

It can be a difficult question to answer and we think that it is individual to each company trying to market on the internet, however we also think that a correctly organized organic campaign can be more effective in the long run in terms of cost.

- Nick -

When we first thought about answering this question, user behavior came to mind, so we found this eye tracking report from enquiro. This shows a very nice visual representation of where an average Google user looks once they have performed a search query.

- James -

You can see from the image that the user naturally looks towards the top left hand side of the results and in particular the first Pay Per Click result and top 2 organic listings. This suggests that if you want to gain the full benefit from your campaign then you need to be in the top 3 positions.

What this means is if you are going pay for your listings with Google Adwords then you really have to be the highest bidder in order to be the first listing.

- Nick -

With this in mind we thought we would use the information that the external keyword tool provides to estimate the cost of optimising for a couple of phrases, organic vs PPC.

You can see we have taken the average search volume for the phrases ‘air conditioning’ and ‘web design’, then the click through rate or CTR based on 3%. 3 -5 % is pretty average for CTR (Click through rate), but it can vary with each campaign. We have then multiplied the CTR with the CPC or cost per click to get a monthly cost.

So as you can see for ‘air conditioning’ it would cost on average £1200 per month to be in position 1-3 on Google Adwords, to be position one constantly it would it would undoubtedly cost most. Organically Creare would charge somewhere in the region of £500 per month for this phrase.

The other phrase we analyzed ‘web design’ would cost Creare over £5000 per month to be in position 1-3 on Google’s sponsored listings, so our organic listing provides us a much more profitable return on investment.

- James -

Of course you do have to remember that with Pay Per Click the results are instant, but with organic SEO there are a large amount of factors which contribute to a site performing in a search engine organically. What this means is that an organic campaign has a time scale attached to it. Going back to what we said at the start, organic will provide a better ROI, but you have to patient and expect to see a fluctuation in results until the domain reaches the required authority to list in the top 3 positions.

- Nick -

There is no reason of course that you cannot run Pay Per Click campaigns along side your organic strategy in order to reap the benefits of both. Thanks for watching if you have any question or comments please leave them on You tube or the supporting blog post.

Enquiro eye tracking report on Google

The majority of people are new to this whole computer/Internet thing, and for those of us that have spent our whole adult lives glued to a keyboard, it can be difficult to think what we did before the computer age.

So how did businesses survive without Internet, without Blackberry’s and without teams of people constantly flicking through search engines?

We all have the ability to prise our eyes away from a screen and read the paper, go to the local pub and just not think about SERPS for one night. And by doing this, you may just improve your SEO and the listings of your customers.

Regardless of what your contribution is in terms of SEO, whether its link building, copy writing or market research, taking a break and walking away from your computer for a while can make all the difference when you return back to your well moulded chair.

Of course, as with anything, your aims and goals should remain at the back of your mind. By thinking about a project, you mentally fog what you need to do. By relaxing your mind, ideas will spring out and you can see more clearly what your aiming to achieve and the best to doing it.

Communication is key and we can sometimes rely too heavily on our computer to take up our time. By spending quality time with friends, or merely surrounding yourself with people you will surprised about what you pick up that will help you with your own work.

The majority of Search Engine Optimisation involves the process of writing and marketing businesses to help them appear at the top of the Search Engines. Both areas are about communication and by spending time with real people, your techniques will improve three fold. By listening to others you can pick up various ways that people persuade, pitch, argue and advise, even if it’s simple about who buys the next beer!

So, next time you’re tearing your hair out trying to find something to write, build or design, my advice is to step away from your computer and take some time out, you will be surprised what your brain comes up with when it’s had time to relax.

There are many, many lists of “101 free SEO tools that you must try” but who wants to try 101 of them? I know I don’t have time to test 101 tools, however useful they may be to others. So, I’m giving you a list of the free tools I use every day to test the performance of web sites. I use these 5 every single day. Of course I have other paid tools that I use as well.

1. Google Analytics
   Without this excellent tool I know I can’t measure successes (or failures). If you don’t install Google Analytics on your website you’ve got no way of knowing how well your site is doing. How can you tell if that new page you added is bringing in the visitors? Or if your new contact form is user-friendly enough for your visitors? Well you check your analytics of course!
2. Google Webmaster Tools
   Google have fairly recently updated their webmaster tools and now they are even better than before. Webmaster Tools give you so much information about your site, like how they crawled it, if error pages came up, if they encounter any deadlinks etc. You can also submit an xml sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools, which is helpful in getting your site indexed, I recommend updating the xml sitemap every time you add a page to your site, then resubmitting it through Webmaster Tools. I would highly recommend this tool.
3. XML Sitemap Generator
   This leads me into the next free tool that we use every day here are Creare. The xml sitemap generator does exactly what it says on the tin. XML sitemaps are useful for the search engine spiders because it gives them the information they need to crawl the site effectively. We set the priority to “Automatic Priority” this gives the index page a higher priority than internal pages. Once you’ve generated your sitemap, upload it to your server and tell Google that it exists (see previous point above)
4. Google Adwords Keyword Tool
   We use this free tool to help us decide where to place keywords on a site. The search volume results tell us which keywords re more competitive and therefore need more effort in terms of both internal optimisation and external optimisation.
5. Yahoo! Site Explorer
   This tells us how many links our competitors have and the value of those links. This is extremely important for getting links because we can target sites where we know they give out links quickly and easily. Of course this isn’t the be all and end all of our link building campaigns, but it certainly helps us a great deal.

So, this is my top 5 free Search Engine Optimisation tools, every single one of these is incredibly useful and I can’t imagine doing my job without them.

What tools do you use to help with your search engine optimisation?

Have you tried all of these tools? If not, will you?

I spend some of my time at work reviewing customers’ websites that have slipped back in the SERPs. The reasons behind the slipping could be anything: Perhaps the competition has been upping their game to increase their backlinks, or, their copy is more keyword rich than ours, or, maybe Google has just had a blip? It’s my job to find out why the site has slipped and to do the work (or recommend to someone else what needs to be done) to push the site back to its rightful position as number 1, page 1 (we accept nothing less!)

Initially I will do a range of checks to assess what needs to be done to improve the site. The first thing I’ll do is check out the competition, asking myself these kinds of questions:

• How many backlinks do they have?
• Can I get backlinks from the same place as them?
• Does their site look better than ours? (Usually, the answer to this question is a very definite “NO!”)
• What’s their content like, is it ‘salesy’ or is it bland and boring? Is it better than ours?

Once I’ve answered these questions, got a load of backlinks and checked the functionality of our site I will do a test for Duplicate Content.

The negative effect of Duplicate Content on SEO

I use Copyscape to find out if someone has copied our customers’ content. I am sorry to say I have lost count of the number of times that I’ve found duplicate content present on struggling sites. Plagiarism has a very real and negative effect on websites.

Sometimes Google thinks the site being copied is the one that has done the copying, and so penalises the wrong site. The Moral is: If you have difficulty writing your copy, whatever you do, don’t copy someone else’s! It may seem like a good idea at the time, but it’s really not.

If your site has been plagiarised then you can follow the steps recommended by Copyscape. However, by that stage, you’re probably best re-writing your copy anyway to ensure that it has original content. Quite often this is enough to bring the site back to where it should be. But, you do have to wait for indexing, which can be agonising!

To prevent plagiarism from happening again, Copyscape has a list of steps to follow. We always place a © declaration in the footer of all our sites, but this deterrent isn’t as effective online as it should be. The only way to ensure your content doesn’t get copied is to regularly update it. This is generally good for SEO anyway; so there really is no harm in it, just more work for the honest Webmaster.