It seems like when it comes to search marketing, the only thing constant is change. However, no matter what surprises the search engines serve up, the fundamentals of search remain the same. Here are three rules to help you build a strong foundation for your search program:
1. Know your customer
Successful marketing always begins with knowing who your customers are: Who are your different customer groups/segments? What do their profiles tell you about their motivations and pain-points? Which customers are influencers vs. buyers vs. users? And so forth.
For search, understanding your customers’ vocabulary is key, so step away from your bad “internal-speak” habits. Don’t take short-cuts when it comes to keyword research, and where possible reference keyword performance data to help build your understanding. You should be able to answer:
- Who are your customers?
- What are they interested in?
- What are they looking for?
- What words do they use?
- What do they type in when they are learning vs. buying vs. using?
2. Let data guide you
Search yields a lot of good data quickly. The key is not to just sit on the data, but use it to make informed decisions about what keywords you focus your time and money on. Ultimately, let the data guide you to get the best return on investment. Use search data to determine:
- What keywords are driving the most traffic?
- What keywords are driving the most conversions?
- What keywords have the best conversion rate?
- What are your golden keywords? (words that drive quantity and quality)
3. One plus one equals three
Although it’s easy to get caught up in day-to-day search details really quickly, every now and then you need to take a step back and remember that search is not a silo; it’s just one component in the overall promotional mix. This is important to keep in mind as you try to better understand the uplift you get through combined PPC and SEO efforts, and how other media can contribute towards your goals.
I’m a firm believer that success boils down to people, not tools. Sure, good tools can make life a hell of a lot easier, but if you don’t have the right people, then you may as well be sitting in a car with square wheels. Very soon I will be on the look out for a new sidekick and it’s got me thinking about what kind of person I need and what personality traits go into making a good search engine marketer.
Here’s a few ideas that topped my list:
1. They have an inquisitive mind
A good search marketer never takes anything at face value. Just like direct marketers before us, the person will always have questions to ask and is not afraid to test out new ideas and experiment with different approaches. Even if those ideas don’t work out, they’ll dust themselves off, learn quickly and move on. In this case, curiosity definitely did not kill the cat.
2. They thrive on change
Whether you are new to search marketing or a seasoned veteran, you know how fast paced this industry can be. Search marketing never stands still; it is constantly evolving (as it should). So it goes without saying that people who don’t deal well with change and refuse to leave their comfort zones will not bide well in the search marketing space. The best search marketers will thrive on change, and rather than seeing it as a roadblock, they take it as an opportunity to adapt and get better (as corny as it may sound).
3. They are analytical, yet creative
A good search marketer doesn’t need to be able to do advanced mathematical calculations in their head. They do, however, need to be relatively comfortable with numbers, and most importantly know how to interpret those numbers in ways that contribute towards business results. The person doesn’t just spew out a bunch of reports and data, rather they have the ability to turn data into information, and use it to solve problems in creative ways.
4. They love what they do
No matter how smart a person is, if they don’t love what they do, then that passion will never translate over. You can usually see it in the way a person talks about what they do (eyes are also very telling) — it doesn’t take much to see if a person gets it, loves it, and spends time with it in and out of the work environment. Regardless of your area of work, I’m a big believer in:
- Continuously learning your subject matter to the best of your ability
- Keeping up-to-date with what’s going on in the industry (EG: through Twitter, conferences etc.)
- Contributing to the community (EG: through blogs, meet-ups etc.)
Did I miss anything? What traits do you think makes a good search marketer?
It’s October and ’tis the season for pumpkin lattes. For me, this means one thing: The fourth quarter is upon us and all of a sudden it’s time to start thinking about search marketing plans for next year.
2011 will be my third time going through this process, and each time I have managed to apply learnings from the time before. Here is an outline and some tips that I’ve found useful when building out an annual search marketing plan.
1. Objectives, Strategies and Key Initiatives
Start with your objectives for the year, tying these back to the overall company objectives and strategies. Is it about achieving growth (either overall, or for a particular business area) or efficiency (doing more with less), or something else? Once you have these in place, your strategies and key initiatives can flow from here.
As a guide, I like to have 2 to 3 solid objectives to set the direction of things to come, and then 4 to 5 strategies to help achieve those objectives. Each strategy will then have 4 to 5 key initiatives/tactics linked to it.
As an example: you might want to grow your presence in the SERP (objective) by focusing on universal search results (strategy), in particular developing video content, adding ratings and reviews, working on real-time content on social networks, and using Google shopping feeds (tactics).
2. Timelines
You can’t do everything at once, so it’s helpful to try and map out a timeline. Start by prioritising which activities need to be completed first versus those which can wait, or those that need more time to organize (EG: scheduling additional resources, like IT). Next, decide which quarter you will work on the tactics, before splitting this out further by month.
If there are tactics that fall outside of your budget, then highlight which are funded versus unfunded within your timeline. This is a good way to pitch for additional budget up front.
Your timeline should act as a guide to help organize your time throughout the year and keep you focused on achieving your overall objectives. At the same time, keep in mind that search marketing is constantly changing, so it’s important to be able to adapt as needed throughout the year.
Timeline Template
3. Budget Allocation
Hopefully you’ve managed to secure the budget you need to cover all of your initiatives. If not, then make sure you highlight within your budget those activities that are not funded (and what metrics you will not achieve as a result of not doing them).
In your budget section, make sure you cover:
- Overall budget splits (including PPC vs. SEO, media spend vs. services, region/country splits, and business segment splits)
- Monthly forecast
- Year-on-year comparisons (and variances)
4. Metrics
This is the part of your plan that will undergo the most scrutiny from above, so expect to spend the majority of your time figuring out the numbers.
Some things to think about include:
- What are your top-level metrics (KPIs)?
- How do these split out by PPC and SEO?
- How do these split out by region/country and business segment?
- Do your metrics link as close as possible to revenue?
- How do these numbers compare to last year?
Over the years, I’ve always wondered what it would be like to have learnt a trade; something useful for “real-life” predicaments. How great it must be to be an engineer, a builder, an electrician, or a plumber. Why didn’t anyone tell me this in school?
Then I stumbled into search marketing, and I landed on my feet without even realizing. Only these past few months, in the midst of a bad experience, it came to light how useful my newly found trade could be. I think Rae Hoffman said it best: “Do not f*ck with a SEO”.
Combine this with the power of social media. Before customers would tell one person about a good experience, and 10 people about a bad one. The Internet turns all of that on its head. Instead of ten, try 100’s, 1,000’s, or in Dave Carroll’s case, 9 million.
As search and social media marketers, we may be a bit more equipped than the average Joe when it comes to Internet onslaughts, but there are many examples where the average Joe has prevailed in his cause. This got me thinking about reputation management and the many different ways your customers can use the Internet against you. Companies beware.
1. YouTube
In one day, YouTube will serve up over 2 billion videos. With access to video becoming more of a commodity (on our computers, phones, iPods, not to mention cameras built for the purpose of uploading video to YouTube), it makes it even easier for anyone to record video and post it for people to see on the world’s biggest video sharing site. And when videos go viral, companies have felt the wrath, including Dell’s exploding battery, Nestle’s palm oil, Warner Music’s soundless videos, and of course United’s broken guitars — to name but a few.
2. Facebook Pages
More than 500 million active users spend over 700 billion minutes per month on Facebook. Like it or hate it, Facebook stats are impressive. Users can easily set up their own pages, calling foul on companies. More often though, companies have found their own pages being hijacked. Back in May, human rights activists protested about conflict minerals on Intel’s Facebook page. Intel’s decision to delete comments and then shut down posts to its page led to an irreversible public relations nightmare. It’s not the first time it’s happened, and by no means will it be the last.
3. Twitter
Twitter has well over 100 million users, and every day another 300,000 users will sign up. With over 600 million search queries made per day, you’d be naive to think that you’re not amongst them. Although the user base is only a fraction of Facebook, we’ve seen time and again that word can spread like wildfire on Twitter, particularly if it gets picked up by the Twitterati.
Fake Twitter accounts have also been known to make the rounds. The @BPGlobalPR satire account has amassed close to 200,000 followers following the Gulf oil spill — 10x more than the official BP company account.
4. Review Sites
People trust reviews, even from strangers. So before I make a purchase, no matter how large or small, the first thing I do is search the web for ratings and reviews. Most of the people I know do exactly the same.
So you can bet your bottom dollar that someone who has had a really bad experience (especially if it’s service-related) will go out of their way to let people know. And if they are savvy, then they will share it on those review sites that appear on the first page of the SERP.
5. Sucks.com
One of the first things I learned when starting out in Internet marketing was:
- Own [yourcompanyname].com
- Own [yourcompanyname]sucks.com
Yes, it is a schoolboy lesson, but you’d be surprised. You need to protect your brand. Don’t assume that the person you’ve disgruntled isn’t smart enough to figure this out before you.
Being a customer on the receiving end, I learned an important lesson to take with me when sitting with my company hat on: Yes, sh*t happens. But sometimes it’s how your company deals with the situation that matters most. The best form of reputation management? Do right by your customers.
If you want to learn more about reputation management, check out Managing Your Google Reputation. I also recommend following Andy Beal.
By now, you would have seen and heard all about Google Instant which takes the Google Suggest feature a step further by not only trying to predict what you are searching for, but also serving up results as you type. Camp Google say the benefits of Google Instant includes: faster searches, predictions that help guide searches, and dynamic results without the need to click a button.
Over the past few days, there have been lots of write-ups and speculation about how this will play out – some insightful, others bordering on the ridiculous. So with that, I wanted to share some thoughts on four mistruths I’ve read about Google Instant.
1. SEO is Dead
Bollocks. Google Instant may try to guide users in their searches, but the search results essentially remain the same for a query – in terms of how they are ranked and how relevancy is determined. It seems that every time Google announces some kind of “evolution”, someone somewhere screams death to SEO. The truth is, SEO has more lives than a cat, and SEO is not going to die any time soon.
2. Letter Optimization is the Way Forward
This one is difficult to type without laughing. Remember, Google Instant just tries to predict what words you are going to type in based on the letters you type. As always, it serves up results based on keywords, not letters. So trying to optimize your pages for letters (and partial words/letter combinations) is not only stupid, but also rather pointless.
3. Google Instant Doesn’t Change Anything
Whilst Google Instant does not mean the death of SEO, we shouldn’t assume that nothing will change as a result of it. We need to watch our results and adapt to new and different opportunities. One area to watch in particular are your longer tail keywords as Instant looks to better refine searcher queries and teach users to search more efficiently. And if you aren’t already paying attention to Google’s search box suggestions, then it’s time to start.
Best said by Mr. Cutts: “SEO has change as a core part, and a good SEO recognizes, adapts, even flourishes with change” — One of the reasons why we love what we do.
4. Impressions will Become Over-Inflated
Due to Google Instant’s dynamic results, there have been a lot of questions around impression count. We’ve been told that Google Instant counts your impressions in a few different ways: If the user types and then clicks anywhere on the page; when the user clicks the search button, presses enter or selects a query; or if the user stops typing and does nothing for three seconds.
The jury is out as to how exactly this will affect PPC campaigns but I think that it’s unlikely to lead to ballooning impression levels, as some have alluded to. Keep an eye on your impressions, but at the same time remember that conversions (and behavior lower down the funnel) are the important numbers.
More Useful Resources
You know what it’s like: You go to a good conference and you soak up all of these great ideas, information and tips that you just can’t wait to jump on as soon as you get back into the office. Then reality hits, and it’s back to the grindstone of cube life and catching up on all those Emails that have piled up during your time out.
One valuable lesson I’ve learned is not to let the day-to-day slog get in the way of moving things forward. Give yourself a week to catch up, then start putting those ideas into action whilst it is still fresh in your mind: Make an action list and chip away at them.
Here’s my to do list from SES San Francisco that I’ll be working on now that my inbox is (sort of) under control:
1. Scale Up SEO
SEO needs more than one part-time person to do well. Focusing on just the “fat head” of searches and other low hanging fruit is just not good enough when 20-25% of all Google searches are unique, and the tail continues to get longer.
The first step in taking SEO seriously is to invest in at least one full-time dedicated SEO resource in order to:
- Expand out your keyword set
- Conduct pro-active site audits
- Provide ongoing education and training to your content providers
- Secure dollars and resources focused on building out content and links
- Give SEO the time and love it deserves
Use the information you learned to put together a business case and fight for that extra resource. Now is great timing for those companies who work by calendar year since the planning process for next year is about to begin (if it hasn’t already). Make sure you get in there early and support your case with numbers that speak to missed opportunity.
2. Focus on Video SEO
When Rand says that video is the most underserved area in the the SERP, you act on it. For me, this was a huge take-away. Video is your best bet in ranking high in the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) and pushing others below the fold – particularly for those really competitive keywords that are difficult to rank high for.
Get together with your content creators now, and work your SEO magic to build out your content and optimize video for the search engines.
3. Data, Data Everywhere
The saying goes, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it” but without a good data analyst, you can’t act on it. Whilst high level data is pretty, it’s not immediately actionable. So it’s time to take that “big picture” data, slice away at it, and drill down into actionable details.
Just like SEO, this is not a part-time job. For me, Eric Peterson put it best at SearchFest 2010: Data doesn’t analyze itself. You need people. The question is not “Do we need…?”, but “How many…?”.
4. Content is King, but UGC Rules
If you’ve shied away from User-Generated Content (UGC) in the past, it’s time to get your bum in gear. UGC helps strengthen your SEO performance by keeping content fresh. Swanson Health Products saw a 163% increase in search traffic from user comments. UGC is also great at helping to capture those long-tail searches, even the really obscure ones.
In addition, it works wonders where your online store is involved. It helps to:
- Increase conversion
- Increase average order value
- Reduce returns
So get with the program: UCG is no longer an option.
5. Don’t Forget About Onsite Search
When someone tells me to improve conversion, many things come to mind: strong call-to-actions; big, promotional buttons; shorter forms; targeted dialogs; headline and copy testing; bribes… the list goes on. I guess my point is, onsite search is not the first thing I think of when it comes to conversion. Big mistake.
Search (be it organic, paid, or internal/onsite) is an online shopper’s best friend, so it’s important to get right. 42% of online buyers say that the first thing they do when they get to an e-commerce site is to type the product name or category directly into the site search box. Therefore, you need to make sure that your onsite search results are helping (not hindering) the buyer:
- Have no dead ends
- Show just enough
- Provide search suggestions
- Use synonyms and misspellings
- Keep it simple
Search Engine Strategies (SES) San Francisco once again delivered a fantastic three days of everything search marketing and more. Along the way I heard some great sessions, met some very smart people, and learned some valuable live blogging lessons.
This was my first time as a live blogger at an event, so I wanted to share some of the key lessons I learned along the way, and (in case you missed them) links to the live blog posts I wrote for Search Engine Watch.
Lesson 1: Do your Homework
Be prepared: It definitely helps to know which sessions you are going to attend up front, and who all the players are (names and companies). My beginner’s tip is to write a session introduction summarizing information about the moderator and speakers ahead of time. This way you can focus on the session content as it happens, rather than trying to figure out who is who, and what they are about. Also make sure everything (laptop/iPad/smartphone) is charged up and ready to go, and that you are able to connect to the wi-fi beforehand.
Lesson 2: Arrive Early
When you know which sessions you are going to attend, make sure you know which room you need to be at and when. It helps to arrive early so you can get a decent seat up front where the press tables and power outlets are. This will also give you time to get logged into your blogging platform, and get settled ahead of time. If you have time between sessions, go talk to the panelists afterwards. You can often get additional information to add to your post, that wasn’t covered in the session.
Lesson 3: Get your Timing Right
Due to the nature of live blogging, timing is really important: the quicker, the better. Unlike “standard” blogging you don’t have the luxury of writing a post, taking a break, and coming back later to make several rounds of edits and improvements. Although timing is key, don’t let silly mistakes slip through the net. Read your post at least twice before you send it live in order to:
- Catch any spelling and grammatical errors
- Check for readability
- Fix formatting
Lesson 4: Spread the Word
Once your post is out there make sure you let people know about it. For example, share it on Facebook, Digg and Twitter, using the conference (and session) hashtags so that attendees, or those just following along, can check it out.
Lesson 5: It Ain’t Easy
This was the most important lesson I learned on my first outing. I never thought that live blogging would be a walk in the park, but at the same time I never appreciated how much hard work it actually was until I was doing it. It takes buckets of concentration on an empty stomach, a strong bladder, and a good supply of caffeine. So total respect goes out to all the pro-live bloggers out there. Even more respect to those superheroes who are able to live blog and tweet simultaneously.
My Live Blog Post Summary:
Day 1
- How Large Advertisers are Accelerating their SEO with Social Media
- Meaningful SEO Metrics: Going Beyond the Numbers
- Deep Dive into Analytics: When Bounce Rate no Longer Floats your Boat
- Developing Great Content
Day 2
- Crossing the Digital Divide: The Leap From Search to Display
- Scaling Up Your SEO Campaigns
- Twitternation and Automation
- Beyond the Click: What Shoppers Need Now
Day 3
Every year, I get to choose one “big” search marketing conference to go to. The conference I’ve chosen for the past three years has been Search Engine Strategies (SES) in the Bay Area, and after months of waiting, it finally kicks off next week. Although I’ve been to SES twice before, this year will be slightly different in a few ways.
Firstly, it has moved from its San Jose location to one of my favourite cities in the world: San Francisco, which I am very pumped about (not just because I can fill my boots up with dim sum and crab).
Secondly, SES this year is co-inciding with ClickZ’s Connected Marketing Week. What does this mean? Well, next week San Francisco is the place to be for digital marketers, search engine marketers, social media marketers, and yes, even those pesky Email marketers. It’s going to be one, big, online marketing love fest!
Finally, this will be the first year I’ll be live blogging from the event, for my friends over at Search Engine Watch. Although I’m used to manic-tweeting from conferences, this will be my first experience in the live blogging arena… Eeek!
I’ll be covering a number of different sessions each day, including:
- How Large Advertisers are Accelerating their SEO with Social Media
- Meaningful SEO Metrics: Going Beyond the Numbers
- Developing Great Content
- Beyond the Click: What Shoppers Need Now
- Channel Surfing: Measuring Profit and ROI Across Channels
- Augmented Reality – A New World Order
If you’re going, give me a shout, and I’ll see you there. If not, I know there’ll be some great Twitter coverage, as always. The hashtag is #SESSF, so follow along. And of course, they’ll also be lots of blogging going on over at Search Engine Watch.
I’m off to give my fingertips a work out and break down my resistance to American spelling. Let me know if you have any tips for me.
August marks my one year anniversary as a blogger. When I mentioned this to a friend (who works in a totally unrelated field) they asked me, “Does it pay well?”. I kind of chuckled and said, “I don’t know, because I don’t get paid to do it”. Of course, this led to the inevitable, “So why do you do it?”. What a great question and it got me wondering, why on earth do people blog? Particularly those who don’t do it for a livng.
Here’s what I came up with:
1. To Share Knowledge The Feel Good Factor
The naive little girl in me likes to think that people are altruistic in nature and simply like to share their experiences to help others avoid making the same mistakes. If you read a text book it will likely say that this is the primary motivation behind forums… but then again, text books also say that PR is free.
Let’s face it, at the end of the day, people (on the whole) are selfish and although the idea of pure altruism is nice, I think that it only really happens under exceptional, even life-changing, circumstances. Blogging tends not to be one of those situations. Sharing information through blogging does, however, make us feel better about ourselves and allows us to demonstrate what we know, whilst contributing towards the community in which we are (or strive to be) a part of. It can also provide a nice talking point in those uncomfortable networking functions.
For me, the ability to share knowledge and feel good about it is the reason why I started blogging… coupled together with a premature mid-life crisis which had me constantly asking myself, “What exactly have I done of value in my life?”.
2. Peer Recognition
If you are really good, blogging can catapult virtual unknowns to subject experts and can even earn you “celebrity” status within the community. It can open up opportunities along the way including book deals, speaking gigs, new business deals, job offers… not to mention stalking-like activities at conferences.
Of course, I don’t really believe that people blog just to seek out fame, but there are more practical opportunities that can arise for the every day blogger, including recognition from industry peers who you can bounce ideas off and ask opinions from (for free!). I think you’d agree, most of us would take that over being an F-List celeb.
3. A Sense of Achievement
My memory resembles a sieve more and more as time goes by. A blog is a great way to keep a diary of thoughts, challenges and accomplishments. It provides a good reminder of what you have had to overcome and lessons you have learned in order to succeed.
Each blog post I write provides a marker for what I was working on or thinking about at a particular point in time and every once in a while, it’s nice to be able to go back and remember the lessons learned. It’s also interesting to read older posts with the benefit of hindsight, particularly those focused on topics that were uncertain at the time, but have moved forward since.
4. Lazy Explanations
If you’re like me, you always have too much on your plate, so anything that can help save a few minutes here and there is always welcome.
One unexpected benefit I’ve come across whilst on my blogging journey is that blog posts make a great point of reference for recurring questions. For example, I often get questions about sponsoring competitor keywords and partner PPC. Rather than type out an explanation each time, you can just refer people back to that post (or cut and paste into your Email) and voilà… instant answers!
5. Broadening Horizons
There’s a big, wide world outside of our cube walls. Few of us are lucky enough to experience everything that’s out there; but that’s not to say we shouldn’t try.
I don’t want to be confined to just knowing about B2B, large enterprise companies, targeting men who wear Crocs and like Star Wars. I want to test out Facebook ads and YouTube videos, apply blog metrics, learn the latest B2C E-commerce techniques, and see how a “Mom and Pop store” (aka a “Corner Shop” in the UK) can use location-based services to better their business. And then I want to write about it, without being shut down by the branding police.
Blogging helps to keep your creative juices flowing and provide you with a sense of accomplishment outside of your comfort zone. It really is a great outlet if you like to learn and try out new things. Additionally, you can often find ways to apply these learnings to the industry you work in. Mike Moran hit this on the nail in his post about How Good B2B Marketers Cheat.
Finally, I think that the stakes are raised a lot higher in today’s market, to the point that it’s not just about saying you are knowledgeable in a particular field, or writing in your CV that you are passionate about what you do; it’s about showing that you live and breathe your subject area outside of the 9-5 workspace.
So tell me, why do you blog?
When I was a kid, I wouldn’t go anywhere near a book that didn’t have pictures and my favourite toy was my Fisher Price music box. Luckily, I developed a better appreciation of words and content as I got older… but that’s not to say I’m still not a sucker for pictures and video.
I know I’m not the only one who likes visuals. When I post a link, I will often get more clicks to an image or video than what I would to a standard HTML page. Would the Old Spice viral campaign have achieved 6 million views in the first 24 hours (more than Obama’s victory speech) if those videos were just words on a page? Whilst describing Isaiah’s abs in words may be fun, I think you’d agree: seeing is believing!
As Old Spice showed, video can have a big impact on your brand. Whether you have video on your site, or on a third-party site, or both, it’s important to optimize it for search. So here’s a few tips to help you with your video optimization efforts.
1. Start with great content
Whilst great content alone will not earn you that coveted top rank, it certainly helps you on your way. If your content is worth people’s time, then they will watch it and if they like it, they may even share it with their network. It’s always a lot easier to get (or ask) people to link to content that isn’t crappy, and whilst SEO can lead viewers to water, only the video itself can make them drink.
So with this in mind, it is wise to find out what your audience is interested in and develop content to address those needs. Sometimes what companies “think” their customers want is very different to what their customers “actually” want. Just like with the written word, people watch and share videos that are appealing and interesting to them. Great content will form the foundation of your optimization efforts.
2. Produce a video transcript
Search engine algorithms are smart, but not to the point that they are able to watch your video to determine how relevant it is to a person’s search query (not yet anyway). The fact of the matter is that they need written content to physically crawl and index.
This is where video transcripts come in to play. Make sure that when planning out your video content, your writers know exactly what keywords you are targeting. This way the script can be developed to prominently utilize these keywords, resulting in keyword-rich transcripts for the engines to crawl.
3. SEO your tags and descriptions
When submitting your videos to third-party sites, make sure you tag your video with your keywords, and include your keywords in the header tag, alt tag and title – just as you would when optimizing any of your preferred landing pages for search.
In terms of the description field, the best recommendation I’ve seen is from the very knowledgable @SEOCatfish:
- Start with a link to your website or wherever you want the viewer to go for more information
- Follow it with two sentences summarizing what the video is about
- End with the video script
According to comScore (2009), we watch more YouTube videos than what we conduct Google Searches. If you’re a YouTube user you’ll know how easy it is to click away from the video you are watching and 20 minutes later end up in a completely unrelated path to what you started out on – it’s like ADD on steroids. For this reason, I think starting the description with a link back to your website is a great way to try to break that browsing mode and get interested viewers back to your site to learn more.
4. Spread its availability
If you’ve spent the time, effort and money to create a video, then it makes sense to put it out on the Internetz and make it available in as many places that it makes sense to, including:
Your Website – Build out an area on your website where all of your videos can live. As with your other pages, make your video page search friendly – create a video sitemap; optimize your video titles, headings, descriptions and tags with your keywords; keep your page load times down; and remember to link to your video pages from within your site using the appropriate anchor text.
Third-party sites – by posting your video on external video sharing sites, like YouTube, you can open up the availability of your video to a much wider audience. If your video is done right, you can use the video to reel viewers on these sites back to your own site where they can learn more. This can be particularly useful for targeting those who may be in the interest and early consideration stages of the buy cycle. Also, if you have a network of distributors, make it easy for them to embed the video on their sites too, which leads nicely into…
Social Sites – Making your videos easy to bookmark, share, comment, and rate can help improve your viral potential. If your company is active in social channels (for example, on Twitter or Facebook), then link to your videos from these places to further encourage sharing, “likes” and comments. Social search efforts are still taking shape, but you don’t want to miss out on any potential social factors in search algorithms when things do move into full swing.
5. Choose an interesting thumbnail
The thumbnail may not seem like a big deal, but when your video appears in search engines, or when your viewers are scanning video lists, or when your supporters are sharing videos, the video thumbnail will likely be the first thing that catches their eye (at least, I know it is mine!). So remember not to overlook this, and make sure you carefully choose an interesting thumbnail image that encourages the would-be viewer to click and see more.
What tips can you share to help optimize video for search?
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