By Sara Villegas Video content is becoming increasingly important for businesses with an online presence. A video-rich site can increase search rankings, and having a video library to fuel your social media content strategy can be very useful. Video content also encourages your audience to interact with your content, both on your website and on social channels. But have you ever thought about optimizing your video content for search? If not, you might be missing out on a big opportunity. We’ve compiled a list of some bet practices to remember when you are building your video library on YouTube. Your YouTube Channel This is where many viewers will get their first impression of your brand on YouTube, so it’s important to make your information clear, branded and useful to your audience. This will also make it easier for potential customers…
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SEO Tips
SEO Resolutions: Make Them Count
When it comes to new year’s resolutions, setting goals that are specific and measurable can make the difference between success and failure, and the same is true for your SEO resolutions. The goal of simply getting more traffic won’t give you any more benefit than the nebulous goal of losing weight. Instead of setting broad, non-specific goals, drill down into what you really want and need for your website. If it’s more traffic, what kind? What do you hope those visitors will do once they arrive on your website? How will you determine when that goal has been reached? The bottom line: your SEO resolutions need to be both specific and measurable for you to get maximum results. Get Specific for Optimal SEO Benefit Before you even bring in an SEO consultant sit down with all your website’s stakeholders and…
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Use Q and A Sites to Increase Your SEO
The internet is always evolving. And so are the tactics we use to get people’s attention on it. SEO, linking building, social media—these are all things we can do to boost our site traffic and get noticed by search engines. Because, let’s be honest, Google is where you need to be to get noticed on the internet. And most users won’t even go past the first 5-10 results on a page before trying something different. And since almost half of users click on the first search engine result, you want to get right there where the most people will click on you. And one of the ways to do that is to get as many links back to your site as possible scattered across the internet. Backlinks to boost your SEO can be posted on other websites, blogs, social media,…
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How to Use Meta Descriptions for Search Engine Optimization
From time to time you may find that Google snatches odd bits of text from your site to display in search results. This can be extremely frustrating to site owners who are trying very hard to specifically get their meta description to display in the search results—right under the link to their site. In fact, most site owners specifically craft their meta descriptions as a way to boost their SEO. In general, your Google snippet is taken either from your meta description or from your page copy. If you want to boost your SEO, and search results appearance, there are a few things you can do to increase the likelihood that your meta description will be used instead of on-site copy. This is also called snippet optimization. Snippet Optimization 1) How to write a good sentence for SEO Google likes…
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Basic SEO Tips for Small Businesses
Small businesses are the backbone of the economy, and there are millions of small business in the US that employ millions of people, keeping our economy running and our nation wealthy. But in order to survive in the open marketplace, every small business needs visibility. Today, visibility means ranking high in Google search results for the keywords you are trying to capture. The basics of trying to get to the top of search results is called search engine optimization (or SEO). Many large companies hire a specialized SEO services firm to help them boost their page rank, but many small businesses don’t have the money to spend on that type of large-scale effort. Small Business SEO However, booting your SEO doesn’t have to be extremely expensive. Most small business can hire a SEO services firm that offers cheaper packages for…
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Increasing Search Engine Optimization Through Affiliate Links
There are many companies and brands out there who bring in a lot of revenue through their affiliate programs. Affiliates can be great for generating a lot of traffic to your site, but often, affiliates websites don’t actually give you any SEO love. That is, search engines often interpret the links back to your site from your affiliates as advertisements or other content that doesn’t really count toward your organic SEO rank. But you can change that. And here are a few ways you can get your affiliate links to boost your search engine optimization. 1) Keep affiliate links clean for good SEO Although many of your affiliate links lie behind structure that Google doesn’t crawl, whenever you have a chance to share a link, make sure your link is clean. In other words, make sure that the URL is…
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Title Tags are Less Important: SEO for Your Site Text
It seems that our HTML title tags are being used as snippets and page titles in the results of a Google search with decreasing frequency. This can be maddening to site owners who are trying to boot their SEO by optimizing their title and page tags. But title and page tags are an easy target. That is, it’s easy for any site to put whatever it wants in the title tags, hoping that Google will place it in the search results. For example, a great black-hat SEO. trick to use is to include page and title tags that have no bearing whatsoever on the actual content of the site in attempt to lure unsuspecting users into coming to their site. Keyword Tags are Ignored by Google Google recognizes this fact and has continually placed a diminishing amount of importance on…
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Scraping and Content Farming Bad for SEO
Google is constantly trying to improve the search experience by updating its search algorithms to give users more relevant and high-quality content. But algorithms can always be fooled, and there will always be people out there who want to exploit search engine algorithms to boost traffic to their site. Some use black-hat SEO practices, like paid-links and keyword stuffing, but cheaper tactics that seem to work better are site scraping and content farming. However, they won’t give you lasting boost—at least not since Google changed it’s algorithm to penalize these sites. Scraping and Farming Site scraping is the act of republishing content from other websites (usually primary news sources) on a secondary site automatically. For example, if I ran a website that sold electronics, I could set up automatic RSS feeds of other high-profile technology- and gadget-themed websites that would…
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Building Your SEO Through Optimized Site Architecture
Search engine optimization encompasses many things. In the mind of many SEO novices, generally small business owners or self-taught website designers, SEO is mostly about getting the right keywords. They think that as long as you can work in “construction company” ten times on each page, you should rank high in a search engine results page. Although keywords are important, there are a number of other factors that go into creating great SEO for your site. In fact, you can build a lot of search engine love for your site if you take the time to flatten out your site architecture. What Google Looks For When the Google site crawlers look at your website, they place importance on different factors. For example, they’ll place more importance on keywords in your heading then in your body text, and they’ll place more…
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Search Engine Optimization Tips for New Web Designers
Today, everyone is a web designer. The skills and tools it takes to build a website nowadays are so cheap that just about anyone with an internet connection can become a web designer over night. With a little training in Photoshop and Illustrator and wee bit of HTML and CSS knowledge, you can start designing your own site and sites for all your friends. But just because you can design a cool site doesn’t mean anyone will actually see it. In fact, a website is useless unless you can attract traffic to it. And that is what search engine optimization is all about. An SEO services firm can really do a lot of good for your website with a broad-based SEO strategy that encompasses site content, blogging, twitter marketing, adwords management, and more. But not everyone has the money to…
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