Google +1 PDF Overview

To start, you need to warm up. That is, don’t immediately plunge into trying to sell something—people catch on to that. Just like how you shouldn’t start running (or yogging) before stretching or you’ll come to a screeching halt, you shouldn’t just jump into trying to sell your brand. This is the most difficult part of the strategy to build a Twitter base—patience. And this is also the most vague—create good content! Basically, add to the conversation! If a topic is trending, hashtag it with a witty or original comment or content. Think about ways to be interesting without being commercial. People can tell when you are trying to sell them something, trust us. The car salesman we’ve all encountered from time to time definitely is a turn off, and one fast way to turn a potential follower/customer into a negative detractor.

So, speaking of content, one good way to generate content people want to see is through giveaways. Now, yes, this probably isn’t the best business model to just give things away to get some Twitter followers, but think more long term—if you give away something that you can afford to give away free, and you can gain a long term follower of your company in the process, you can end up making back the money you lose giving away the free product. But, to ensure you get followers, make sure you make one of the conditions to be entered in the giveaway either a retweet or you have to follow your company. This goes without saying. Usually, a retweet may be more successful, as a follower may unfollow you as soon as the giveaway is over.

Next thing to consider is that people enjoy interaction. Nobody enjoys logging on to Twitter and not having mentions—so interact with your fan base! This is definitely a beginning strategy, because when you are starting, it is much easier to interact with your followers, as the number won’t be that large. But once you start picking up a following (in the mid range), start targeting influential followers for mentions. Use Klout (or many other free tools to measure Twitter influence) to find those users who are deemed “influential.” Then, mention them in Tweets. Any interaction is beneficial to your follower count, especially positive interaction. And, if you get one of the “influential” Twitter uses to Retweet you, all the better.

Next, be sure to be a member of #TeamFollowBack. This means that for anyone who follows you, you follow them back. This is good in the initial stages of your Twitter development, as people are more likely to follow you if they know they can get a follow back. This plays a bit on people’s pride (more Twitter followers? Yes please!) but it is a very good way to get an initial spike of Twitter followers. But, be sure you discontinue this practice after you get a good following, as your follower to following ratio, in order to look like a legitimate (and not spammy) Twitter account of a business, needs to be more than 1:1. Otherwise, people may not follow you, because you can’t get people to follow you with a a follow back.

Finally, try to be patient, as simple as this may sound. Keep normal standards of ROI away from your Twitter account. Don’t get me wrong—you need to know if your time and money is going towards a worthy cause. And you need to establish some sort of breaking point for your business, tailored to your individual company’s needs and goals. But, you need to give it time. Don’t let your standard calculations of ROI keep you from establishing a formidable Twitter following. Because the returns on investment may be slow at first, but given enough time and effort (and with these starting tips utilized) the business you can generate from a successful Twitter account can be massive.

So, to conclude, the beginning stages of your Twitter account can be the most difficult, and trying to your patience. But you must be patient—create good content first. Then, think about giveaways as well as interaction with your followers in general. Especially with your influential followers. And then, let people know initially you are a member of #TeamFollowBack, which should help your follower numbers as well. And through all of this, be patient, because if you aren’t, you will find yourself Tweeting to nobody, without making a sound.

It may help to know that most people just don’t know where to begin, so you aren’t alone. There is a ton of information on SEO, but it is very easy to get lost in all of the details and quickly feel overwhelmed.  In order to help clear the clutter, I have put together a list of the first steps to set you on the path for SEO greatness.

1. Create a Google account. The next several steps all require you to create accounts within Google. You can use a non-gmail email for them, for instance erin@mycompany.com, as long as you set it up as a Google Account. You will get a confirmation email that you must click through before you can proceed to the next steps.
2. Set up Google Analytics. Use your email address that has been cleared with Google to create a Google Analytics account. Be sure to take the tracking code provided during set up and add it onto every page of your site. We have put together a more detailed step-by-step instruction guide for creating a Google Analytics account that you can follow for help. Once you install the code, check back in a day or two to make sure you are actually tracking data. There is a lot of rich website information found in Google Analytics, and even if you don’t have much traffic to your site now, you can at least see where the traffic have is coming from.
3. Set up Analytics Goals to track additional metrics. Are people able to download a whitepaper on your site? How about submit info within a contact us form or sign up for a newsletter? These types of actions can all be tracked by creating goals within Google Analytics. Think about your site and what additional information it might be helpful to have, and then create a goal for each of these.
4. Open a Google Webmaster Tools account. Use the same login information that you did for Analytics to create a Webmaster Tools (WMT) account. From there, you will need to add in your URL and verify the website. We have written a quick guide to Google Webmaster Tools to help you along the way.
5. Create an XML sitemap. If you don’t have an XML sitemap on your site already, be sure and create one as this will help you get indexed. There are several free tools out there to help you easily create it. We use GSiteCrawler most frequently simply because of habit, but I have used others and in the end, the result is the same. Once you have your sitemap, be sure to add it to your website and submit it within Google Webmaster Tools.
6. Find, Review and Correct Site Errors. Review the reports in your WMT account to identify errors with your site. From there, correct any problems like 404-pages, etc. to make sure you are operating with a 100% functional site.
7. Open a Bing Webmaster Tools account. Although Google has the lion’s share of search traffic, you can’t ignore Bing. You never know, without Analytics data, more than half of your traffic could be coming from this search engine. Set up a Bing Webmaster Tools account and submit your sitemap similar to the process you followed in Google. Also review error reports to make sure Bing is reading your site correctly.

Although, at this point, you haven’t yet done a lot of the heavy lifting required for SEO success, these first seven steps are already putting you on the right track and are the must-do’s before you go any further.

Now you are officially ready to start optimizing for improved rankings and traffic. Make sure you have put a little effort in determining a strategy before you dive in. Next, you will want to define your keywords, and then work to update your content as well as write new where necessary. From there, continue to work on building an internal linking structure as well as put together a plan for link building.

Although the big gains are going to come from these additional efforts, which are really the core of SEO, it is important to tackle the basics first. Without website data, you will have no way to verify what impact your additional efforts are having. What are you waiting for…get started!

Sticking with the farming theme from my last post, today I’d like to cover using silos in your SEO strategy. I think it’s been too long since anyone’s talked about silos, and I find it to be a crucial SEO best practice. Silos refer to the way in which you organize and group your site content. In other words, you want each page of your site to have ‘themed,’ keyword-relevant content. If you haven’t been using silos to organize your site’s keywords, content, and architecture – or you’re not familiar at all with this concept – here’s a rundown of why to use them:

In my opinion, that alone is reason enough to utilize silos when putting together content for your site. But, here are some more reasons if you’re on the fence:

• Keep it friendly: As an SEO, your job is to make a site friendly to both search engines and users. Using silos helps you do both! For search engines, silos basically allow you to help them understand the theme of each page, and this can even help you rank better for long-tail terms because the search engines will be better able to recognize your authority on a specific topic. For users, it’s simple: you need to quickly convince them that your site is where they want to be and you offer what they’re looking for. When each page of your site is easy to navigate and easy to understand, there’s a better chance they’ll stay on your site!
• Be the authority: When each page of your site is highly organized and has relevant content, the search engines will consider your site an authority on that product or topic. Keep in mind that search engines are looking for keywords on each page as well as how relevant your content is to keywords.
• Focus inbound links: If you organize your content into keyword-rich themes for each page, this will help you focus on and distribute your links to the page content that will get the most benefit.
• Increase your rankings: The result of all of these is better rankings on the SERPs! And who doesn’t want that??

So How Do You Create Silos?

At Hanapin Marketing, we consider siloing a best practice when creating a site structure (you can also check out a great post on SEOmoz about site architecture!). As you’ve read, there are too many benefits to having highly themed, keyword-rich pages to not use silos. Search engines will love you more, users will love you more, and clients will love you more for helping their site rank higher!

There are three types of silos (and we recommend that you use all three):

Ultimately, silos really are crucial to a great SEO strategy (…and they’re a little bit common sense, too). Utilizing silos will make your site more search engine and user friendly, you’ll be able to focus inbound links, and you can become an authority on your product/service – all while improving your page rank! When done right, silos will improve your site.

Before I get into the different ways to optimize your blog, I first want to suggest you download the All in One SEO Pack plug-in if you don’t have it installed already. It makes optimizing your blog a much simpler process. You can download the plug-in here and view download instructions here.

Once you have installed and activated the plug-in go to Settings >> All in One SEO. Here is where you can begin changing the SEO settings for blog-wide optimization.

Blog-Wide Optimization

Title Tags

Title tags are one of the most important elements of search engine optimization and effect both user experience and search engine optimization. The title tag of each page should be a clear and concise description of the pages content. In the All in One SEO Pack you can easily create title tags for your home page, posts, and other content pages on your site.

Home Title: When creating a title for your home page, best practice is to include your brand name and a keyword you want to rank for.

For www.seoboy.com we want to rank for the term “search engine optimization.” We also want people to know and remember our blog so we include The Adventures of SEO Boy at the top of every page.

Post and Page Titles: AIO SEO Pack also lets you format the titles for each content page. If you scroll down a little further you will see a list of other page titles you can edit. The two most important from this list are the Post Title and Page Title:

By default, AIO includes the home title on all other titles, using the vertical bar to separate the two. There is wide debate on whether to include your home title but the choice is up to you. At Hanapin, we include The Adventures of SEO Boy  for branding purposes. Keep in mind though that most search engines show about 70 characters of the meta title. If you have a long post or page title you are likely to exceed your title length. Below is an example of one of SEOBoy’s posts with a long title:

If you want to remove the home title from your post and page titles all you have to do is delete “| %blog_title%” from the boxes. You can leave all other title options as is, since the category and archive pages tend to have short titles.

Meta Tags

The meta description tag is a short description of your pages content that appears underneath your link on search engine result pages. Enter your meta description into the Home Description box:

Think of your meta description as functioning like an advertisement for your blog. Use those 160 characters to entice your audience to click your link. You should also include keywords in your description, but don’t go overboard. Make sure the description still sounds natural.

Permalinks

Permalinks are the URL’s assigned to each post. By default, post URLs in WordPress look like this: http://www.seoboy.com/?p=123.  This is not very pretty nor descriptive. To change the permalink settings go to Settings >> Permalinks.

Select Custom Structure and enter /%postname%/ into the box. Click Save Changes at the bottom of the page and your permalinks will now display the post title after your main URL.

Individual Post Optimization

Now that you’ve optimized SEO for your blog as a whole, it’s time to focus on optimizing each post. When you create a new post, or if you edit an old one, the AIO SEO Pack will appear at the bottom of the page:

Post Title

The first thing you’ll want to do is give your post a title including the main keyword you are targeting in your post. It is important to note that the title of your blog post is NOT the same as the title you assign in the SEO Pack.  The post title in the SEO Pack is what displays on the search engines. To better understand the difference, take a look at the examples below.

This is the blog post the way it appears on the main site www.seoboy.com:

To shorten the title for search engine display, this is what we entered into the SEO Pack…

… and this is how it appears on search engines:

You should use this method for blog posts with long titles. You may want to be more descriptive in titling your actual post so the reader knows what it covers, but shorten it for search engines to ensure the whole title tag is displayed.

Post Description

Follow the same guidelines for writing this description as you did for the home page description. Write something that will grab reader’s attention. If you don’t enter in a post description, the first 160 characters of your blog post will be displayed on the SERP. Since the first paragraph of a post isn’t always the most comprehensive, it is best to write a post description telling users what they can get from reading your blog post and be sure to include a few keywords you’re targeting.

Images

The final method we will cover to optimize blog posts is often one of the most overlooked: image alt tags. Every blog post should include images as it adds excitement to your posts and can often convey ideas better than you can write about them. WordPress generates alt attributes automatically based on the file name.  Because of this, I recommend including a keyword in your file name. I used to title my images based on the order I inserted them into my posts (pic 1, pic 2, …etc). Though it may help you stay organized, this method doesn’t provide any information as to what the image is actually about.

You can add a title and alt text to your image once it is uploaded into WordPress. To access your images go to Media >> Library and click on the image you want to edit. You image page will open up along with this box:

Here you can enter in a title and alt text for your image, along with a caption and description of your image. The title is what will show when a reader mouses over your image and the alt text is what describes the image to the search engine.  Incorporating keywords into your images will help them, and your blog, rank on the SERPs.

These are some basic blog optimization tips for WordPress. Do you have any other ways you optimize your blog or use any SEO plug-ins you can’t live without? Post and share them with us below!

The SEO Honeymoon occurs when you’ve made simple changes that have lightning speed results.  This period is not sustainable, and it’s important to recognize it for what it is, and avoid falling into the trap.  Here are a few key tasks that can lead to your site experiencing its own honeymoon:

• Keyword research
• Title tag optimization
• Prioritizing content for crawlers
• Site redesign
• Call-to-action
• Internal linking
• Including keywords in your anchor text
• Installing an analytics program
• Newly indexed content

If you’re ever in a situation where you inherit a client from another agency or a team member in your own agency, you need to determine if the site actually is doing well, or if it too is experiencing an SEO honeymoon.  Before beginning, it’s best to have a good understanding of that account’s history, and what to ask for during the transition.

Keeping Things Going Post-Honeymoon

As content and the domain ages, the honeymoon phase will begin to taper off.  An important method to combat this is to plan long-term.  As we like to remind our readers frequently, SEO is never over. You’ll want to start looking for new opportunities and goals to reach.

Social:  If the website hasn’t been involved in social media, it’s time to act!  Facebook and Twitter are growing every day, and the search engines are now including social media in their results.  Don’t forget other social sites outside of the “big two.”

Sponsorships and Donations:  Sponsoring relevant events (these can be online or in-person) or making charitable donations is a way to become visible within your community.  Make sure to request a link from the host’s website in exchange.

Blog:  Get the website involved in blogging.  Relationship building with customers and others in the industry helps to grow reputation.  Try and get involved in other’s blogs too.  You can do guest blogging to help bring traffic to your own site.  When you get into blogging, make sure you’re updating your content regularly to see the most benefits!

Link building:  Your page rank and website reach will typically see a boost when you do this the right way, as a site’s Google ranking is partially based on sites that link to it.  There are a number of helpful link building tools to help you accomplish this.  Keep an eye on your competitors so you can catch on to any new efforts they’re making.  Especially pay attention to sites that your competitors link to so that you can request one too.

Content:  SEO thrives on new content.  Make sure your page titles, Meta description, header tags and body are consistently optimized with 3-5 target keywords per page.  Unique copy is an important piece of this puzzle, as search engines can easily recognize duplicates, which hurts your rankings.  Search engines like to get new information to index.

All For One and One For All

Here at Hanapin, we like to do occasional account reviews when one of our team members gets stuck.  If you work in an agency, try setting up a team review effort.  Typically, we have one of two goals with these reviews.

1.)  The site performance has dropped and we need to determine what’s causing it and how to fix the issue.

2.)  The SEO consultant needs some general recommendations of what to do next.

The theory behind a group review is that it’s easy to overlook something that our own eyes see every single day.  Perhaps something tiny that you might have missed could have positive consequences!  Depending on the size of the website, you can decide to let each team member do their own investigating or to break up into smaller teams and each tackle a different area.

This is a great method for generating ideas on overcoming the honeymoon period.  After you’ve decided on the structure for your review, begin checking the following for problem areas:

• View source code of the page
• Check Meta title and descriptions
• Check canonical tag
• Notice where the copy is located on the page (shouldn’t be located at the bottom in the code)
• Check alt tags on the site
• Check anchor text
• Check 301 Redirects
• Look at target terms list – can you incorporate more keywords?

These are just a few examples of places that you and your team can begin to look for problems.  Each team member should take a deep dive into the site and start pulling reports in Google Analytics, webmaster tools (Google and Bing), and any other tools you can get your mouse on (SEOmoz, compete.com, websitegrader.com, Google Trends, etc.).  Does your company have something special you do for “problem accounts?”  Feel free to share in the comments below and thanks for reading!

Resources:

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/are-you-on-an-seo-honeymoon/11717/
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/inheriting-a-website-seo-honeymoon/12813/

Say you’re in a relationship. How many hours a week do you spend with your Significant Other?

Now consider your business. How many hours a week do you spend with it?

Unless you have an amazing secret worked out where you’re spending 80 hours a week with your family and 10 with your business (email me!) I’d bet the numbers are either pretty even or weighted in favor of your business. It takes a lot of effort to make most businesses work, and effort requires time.

But then consider: would you be with someone if you didn’t like spending time with them? Why would you want to spend 40+ hours a week with a business you don’t like? It makes no sense. Our relationships to our businesses, and the client/customer relationships within have as much impact on our overall satisfaction and happiness as our personal relationships, and really, for those of us invested in the success of a business, it does become a personal relationship.

If you have an internet-based business and you really want to be successful in the long term both in terms of financial payoff and happiness, you need to start thinking of your website as you would your relationship.

In the beginning, it’s all very exciting! You’re creating a website about a business you really like! It’s fun and you can’t wait to start gathering clients and actually getting this business off the ground!

As you get comfortable and feeling competent in your new role as an internet businessperson, you start thinking- I could take this thing up a notch! Let’s get some SEO GOING! You start optimizing your site, making new pages, building relationships and interacting with people in your industry and customers…it’s still a lot of fun!

Until one day, it’s…kind of not. It’s human nature to be attracted to novelty, and when the novelty wears off our attention to website optimization, drive to create awesome new content, concern about nurturing relationships, and dedication to social media can wane. Since the proper long-term execution of these is tantamount to the success of your SEO efforts and the overall success of your online enterprise, the entire business begins to struggle as a result of your loss of interest.

Again it’s human nature: if you don’t like it, you’re probably neglecting it.  If you’re savvy enough to realize that you need this business to work, but that you don’t want to do it yourself, maybe you’re outsourcing your SEO and other online strategies to a freelancer or agency who says they have experience, but you don’t check up on their results very much. They make changes on your site and you glance over them. And your website: it feels the pain. No one knows your site like you do, and unless you’ve put in the effort to ensure that you’ve engaged someone who both a) knows what they’re doing and b) knows your goals, restrictions, and values extremely well then you’re still continuing to neglect your old baby, but now you’re paying for it too.

So what to do? You want your site to work. You want to work on other new adventures. You are tired of this business but not ready to give up on it.  You don’t know how to find anyone who can do it how you want it done, and you don’t want to pay that kind of money for help with the site anyway. You’re just sort of stuck. But why? It’s your business…it’s your relationship- so unstick yourself.

If you like it, they will come!

This may not be the most enlightened rule you’ve ever heard for SEO, but in a lot of ways, I mean it almost precisely as I’ve written it. The basic tenet of “good guy” SEO is that if you make your website more like what people want and then connect with those people, then search engines will notice your effort and your connections and reward you with- yay! High search rankings, a bigger network. More people find your awesome stuff.

Here is the strange part that I think a lot of people miss: it doesn’t matter if what you like is weird. I promise you’re not the only weirdo in the world who is into it. And I’m certainly not saying there aren’t best practices for copywriting and site design and site speed and coding tricks and link building and on and on…but really, in the long term, what determines a site which is successful in terms of SEO vs one which fizzles is if you’re willing and able to find ways to follow those best practices while maintaining a website that reflects yourself and your business. If you decide you “need to do” SEO, and then give the reins to a firm without respect for your vision and relationship with the company and customers and let them take over, you’ll end up with a spammy, ridiculous site that everyone, including search engines and your visitors, will recognize as commercial and phony.  Why not change your business and your site in a way that will satisfy you?

The beauty of this is: tweaking an element of your business that’s causing you dissatisfaction is much simpler than getting your husband to stop leaving his dishes in the sink. You have total control over the business relationships and structures you create, which is a freeing realization. Much simpler much simpler than trying to change another human being, but complicated in that it can be scary to make a change that takes you away from what your customer base expects from you, or to try a new strategy that hasn’t been proven to work in your industry.

Is there risk to changing the way you operate/to modifying your basic business philosophy? Of course! No risk, no reward and all that. Being cautious is smart, but you can’t be so risk-averse that you force yourself into misery- I’m sure that’s not what you had in mind when you decided to go into business. Don’t keep being unhappy with your online business and its site and its customer base and your product suppliers and etc etc etc. You have all the power, and your passion and dedication are the deciding factors in the amount of effort you can pour into properly creating content for and promoting your website.

• Facebook was (probably) the most searched phrase on Google in 2010?
• Facebook.com was the most visited page in 2010, surpassing Google.com as the king of Web traffic?
• More and more small businesses are using Facebook as their second homepage?

While I typically cringe when hearing these blanket, pro-social media statements, there is one thing I have to say about them. They are true.

Facebook accounts for approximately 2.7% of the search volume on the Internet. While this might not be a significant number to those of us in the SEO business, you can bet 2.7% percent is important to those brand and community mangers out there. Thus, when ranking organically in the independent states of Twitter or Facebook, small businesses can expect a have a pleasant boost on their overall marketing goals.

This first part of this blog post will help you navigate the young, convoluted, and ever-changing Facebook search landscape, while the second part of the post will help you to coordinate a social SEO strategy that will complement your overall SEO marketing plan.

Social SEO 101: Facebook Auto-Complete vs. Facebook SERP

There are two primary ways to search in Facebook. The first is through AutoComplete, the prominent search bar displayed in the top, center of your Facebook page.

The second way to search on Facebook is the more traditional search engine results page with pre-determined search filters (pages, people, web results, events, etc.).

Auto-complete Explained

True to the Zuckerburg mentality that Facebook knows what you want more than you know what you want, type a search term into the AutoComplete box, hit enter, and Facebook directs you to the first result in its auto-complete form (and not to a full SERP like in Google). To get to a full search results page, it takes an additional click on the “See more results for…” button.

The auto-complete is the best place a brand or company can rank. The most important item to note, however, is that in Facebook, personalization factors carry more significance than search volume. In other words, the more your brand’s content is shared and the more your organizations Facebook page is liked, the better your chances to rank. VerticalMeasures.com does a nice job of summarizing how the AutoComplete box ranks:

That user’s name

Events that user has been invited to

Questions with the search term in it

A friend of the user with the search term in the name

A friend of a friend of the user with the search term in the name

Groups that the user has joined

Apps used by that user

Pages that user has liked

Pages related to that users interests

Pages that users friends have liked

Facebook SERP Layout

The Facebook SERP offers a number of variables you can limit your search by: People, pages, web results, events, groups, etc.

Facebook defaults to the “All Results” search variable, which intermingles apps, events, people, pages, and all other Facebook goodies together in one results page.

Like AutoComplete, there are a few bits of knowledge that can help your organization and brand rank in the more traditional Facebook search:

People, a.k.a friend or second degree friend with keyword in name

Pages with keyword in page name in tandem with total likes. Can outrank friend with keyword in name… sometimes…

Posts with keyword in posts (status updates, links shared, etc.)

Web results, fueled by Bing (important to note for the blurring of lines between social media and search)

Source: AimClearBlog.com

Imrpoving Ranks in Facebook Search

To optimize your company’s fan page for Facebook searches, content managers should concentrate on integrating target keywords into the following areas:

1. Fan Page Name – Keep the fan page name branded. Resist the urge to get clever by attempting to integrate a keyword in fan page name as this cleverness could hurt your branded social search rankings in the long-term.
2. Vanity URL – Similar to the fan page name, keep your vanity URL branded. Also, claim your company’s vanity page URL as soon as possible. Please note: It takes 25 page likes for Facebook to allow the vanity URL for fan pages.
3. Keyword Driven Info Page and About Box – The info page tab and the about box are probably the most important places on your organization’s Facebook fan page to integrate target keywords. On the info page, be consistent with corporate branding for your organization’s products and services.
4. Keyword Driven Status Updates – Adding target keywords to your status updates won’t only add to page relevancy with your current fans, but will also aid in your ranking results for real time search. Additionally, status updates are searchable in the traditional Facebook SERP as far back as 30 days. Finally, inserting keywords here may also be handy for your Twitter account if you happen to duplicate posts between a Facebook and a Twitter account.
5. FBML Pages – Much like the Facebook info tab, you can add the FBML application to include more keywords on your fan page. Treat these tabs as if you were writing web copy for a company website. For example, keywords can be integrated into custom tabs that promote a contest, share a company’s schedule of events, or even a tab dedicated to a company’s history.
6. Photo and Video Descriptions – Optimize all of your online multimedia content with your target keywords in mind. Following a general multimedia search engine optimization strategy across all of your marketing channels should be a primary SEO goal.
7. Adjust Privacy Setting – If you are an individual, you might want to put your Facebook page on lockdown from the general public. However, if you are a company, I suggest opening your page and content up to everyone.
8. Facebook Likes – Promote giveways and contests, ask questions and conduct polls, and engage with your audience as authentically as you can. Basically, do everything possible to increase the number of likes on your fan page. Consider every like a vote to your page’s authority.

Hopefully, this will stand as a starter guide for how the internal Facebook search algorithm works. In addition, the 8 steps above should guide you through the basic social SEO marketing strategies. For a more comprehensive guide to all things Facebook SEO and Ranking, check out aimClear’s study on Facebook’s internal search. AimClear has provided a great resource for us SEO specialists just beginning to dabble in the social SEO realm. Kudos!

But with all the online excitement and the exponential success of 2010’s web-based video advertising, it’s tempting to think that all you have to do is press record, press upload, press play, and then sit back to watch the traffic roll in.  Instead, remember that when making and posting videos, it is imperative that you actively optimize everything for maximum SEO potential.  It’s a simple equation: applying SEO basics + knowing your goals + doing it well = SEO video success.

Apply SEO basics

Intimidated by videos?  Don’t worry: videos respond to many of the same SEO practices that you have done before!  Videos, after all, are simply content, and must be presented to viewers and search engines as you would text.  The one large difference is that search engine bots can’t actually scan the video directly: instead, SEs rely on the content surrounding a video, the number and sources of inbound links, and its community engagement.  Therefore, with videos it’s especially important to

• Incorporate keywords into the title, surrounding text, and tags.
• Maximize your reach by posting on multiple hosting sites, and allowing for interaction such as comments, rating/voting, sharing, video responses, embedding, etc.
• Pursue links like you would for text articles.

But this is only a quick list: for more information, check out SEO Boy’s articles on the top 5 best practices for video SEO, optimizing for YouTube, optimizing for onsite videos, and optimize for third parties, link generation, and ranking.

Know your goals

A well-directed video can work magic for your website; an unfocused one will just take up time, space, and money.  So before you start production, lay out your goals.  Do you want to direct traffic to your website?  Develop brand awareness?  Grow your YouTube channel subscribers?  Choose an approach based on this goal, and make sure that the form of your video supports it the entire way.

One method of staying focused is to bookend your video with information.  In the first 5 seconds, the viewer should know who you are and how to find you; and at the end, you should include a call to action, such as “watch the next video,” “subscribe to our blog,” “visit our website,” etc.  If you’re using YouTube, you can help enable this action by inserting a video annotation with links to wherever you would like your viewers to go.

However, it is important to remember that viewers are leery of obvious advertisement.  For the most part, people watch television for its programming, not its commercials.  Internet marketers have it even harder in this sense, because while captive online advertising exists, viewers have a heightened ability to avoid it by only actively seeking out what they want to watch.  Therefore, even if you’re promoting a specific product, it’s important that your video is entertaining, original, and useful to the viewer, or otherwise they will click away, or not share the video with their friends.

Once you know your goals, set up a way to measure success.  Use analytics to see whether your traffic increased, or your subscribers went up directly after you released the video.  If you connected a video to a product or service, did you end up with more leads?  Being able to see if your video is working will help you know whether to keep exploring your current method, or to switch approaches.

Do it well

Lastly, but most importantly, it’s important that you do your video well.  Again, the record-upload-play model just won’t cut it: to be taken seriously, you need to make the best product you possibly can.  Try applying blogging/copy-writing principles to video editing:

• Watch out for typos – One way to kill a video is to make a straight-up mistake.  Do you have any signs of editing (visible templates, unfinished edges, etc.)?  Is someone standing in front of a window?  Does the sound cut-off?   Build enough time into your editing process so that you can get ready for the mistakes and complications that will inevitably occur.   And don’t forget to test everything before uploading!  There’s usually no way to pause or re-upload videos, so if a problem gets past you, you’ll have to delete your video and all of its historical information before you can start again. 
• Check your syntax – Just like you would pay attention to the grammar, flow, and syntax of a text blog, make sure your video makes sense.  Every scene should lead well into the next, and the editing should be clean.  This doesn’t mean things have to go slowly, or be mundane – keeping a video choppy but sensible is just as much of a challenge.
• Stay current – Before creating a video, see what others have done that is similar, and work from that.  Avoid fads and pre-packaged graphics, because most likely, by time you upload they’ve already been exhausted.  You also want to make sure you check your video properties so that they make use of your current player’s qualities (export in high-def, upload in a format that’s as close as possible to the original encoding, etc.).
• Use what you can – Not every company is going to have the highest quality of equipment.  That’s okay!  Use what you have creatively.  While good quality equipment and software is important, you can start from the ground up with great results. 
• Your form should always be tied to your content – A video is a video.  It’s not a text blog, it’s not a TV commercial, and it’s not a radio spot.  Videos are time-based, visual, and audio, and because it is natural for humans to invest more “truth” in what we see than what we hear or read, they are uniquely attention-grabbing.  Therefore, when writing your script, think of the best way you can get your message across.  A how-to?  An interview?  An interactive plot?  Video is a great place for exploration – if you see the opportunity to try something new, go for it.

Videos are an important part of SEO, and will be increasingly influential as boundaries are tested, broken, and forged.  By creating videos with these best practices in mind, you can join in the community that’s finding out just where videos can take online marketing.  But, of course, with video there’s more than one way to achieve success – what have you tried that’s worked out well?

• Before you do any more for SEO, map out all of your marketing efforts. List out everything you are currently doing, both online and offline to help get your brand noticed. This could include (but certainly not limited) to: public relations, social media, collateral development, dealer incentive programs, tv, radio, outdoor boards, trade shows, promotions, contests, etc. Put this all down on paper so you can later establish the connection to your website.

• Determine your goals, both online and offline. I am a big proponent of defining goals. If you do not have a goal to work towards, what is the point of your efforts? If your company executes a lot of different marketing/promotional tactics, chances are you have an overall marketing strategy and goal already worked out. If you don’t have this, take a step back and map out what you’re really trying to do. Let’s say your goal is to create more brand awareness among females, ages 20-35. That means every effort should be focused on reaching a large audience and simply sharing your brand information and benefits. In that case you would have a different marketing mix that someone who say wanted to generate product trials from females ages 20-35. From there, think about how this overall marketing goal translates to your website and your online efforts. If your overall goal is to generate trials, is your online goal then to capture contact information so you send out free samples? Or is it contact information to then follow up and ask if they want a trial. Also think about how you are going to measure success for what you are trying to do. Go beyond just rankings and think about other metrics – time on site, bounce rates, cost per visit, etc.

• Map out efforts and link them to the online space. When you start to think about it, everything you do is likely driving traffic to your website in one way or another. For instance, if you have a lot of collateral materials, do you put a PDF version (or the content itself) onto your website? If so, you should be thinking about this connection when you write the copy for the brochure. If you aren’t putting your brochures onto your site, why not? This can be a good way to add additional content onto your site.

Now that you have defined your goal as well as mapped out how everything connects to the web, now you can start looking at ways to optimize your current efforts for SEO. You know the most important piece is to define your keywords, but as you determine these for each page of your website, also think about how the keywords can work for you in other efforts.  Continue onto the rest of your SEO steps and best practices that you already know (update page titles, meta descriptions, work keywords into your copy, optimize videos and images for SEO, etc.) Get your website working hard for you, to the best of your ability.

As you get your site optimized, start working your SEO best practices into all of your other efforts as well. Is it time to write & print a new brochure? Give the person writing, a list of your keywords and highlight the top 5-10 most important ones that apply to that brochure. Have them try and work in the keywords into the copy so that once it is complete, you can easily post the content onto your site without much additional effort. Doing this also means you are sending consistent brand messaging as people who see the brochure, then visit your site see a lot of the same terms.

For press releases, do the same thing. Give your PR team your keywords but then also scan the release before it goes out to make sure it is optimized for SEO success. Also, be sure you always include a link back to your site within the release, so if it is picked up, you could also help out your link building at the same time.

Social media, dealer efforts, other collateral, etc. can all follow in a similar fashion. Optimize all mediums from the start so messages are consistent. For more traditional mediums like TV or Radio, make sure you put these on your website as well (assuming you have the rights to do so) and use video optimization best practices to make sure you are ranking. If one of your main keywords you are trying to rank for is “SEO tips”, work that into the TV or radio script so if you later add a transcript version on the site, this keyword is already worked in there.

The biggest key to offline optimization success is to think about where these pieces might end up at some point. If there is any chance they will be online in the future, optimize from the beginning rather than having to go back and do it afterward. This can help save time, money and in the end create a more integrated marketing plan with everything working together to help you rank higher.