Why has video become such an important part of SEO? Why have so many companies decided to use interactive video to upgrade the static content on their websites and blogs? Most importantly, why has video become such a vital tool for companies looking to increase their site’s relevance and authority? In order to answer these questions, think of how video can educate users, how it distinguishes a site’s content and ultimately, how video can engage an audience like few mediums can. Interactive video allows websites and blogs to showcase their content by putting their own unique spin on their product & service offering.

So why has video become so important in SEO? The answer lies in the changes to Google’s algorithm in 2011.  In effort to limit the impact of content farms, and other similar sites that try to influence search results through keyword stuffing, Google unveiled a series of dramatic changes under the banner of “Panda”. Granted, Google changes their algorithm daily, but Panda had an especially huge impact on organic search. They pointed to the importance of having content that engages, educates and incentivizes users to stay on a company’s website. While the overall aim was to improve search results, the consequences were far more severe for webmasters. Panda has changed how content is valued – and there’s no going back.

Today’s content must engage its audience, and nothing does that better than video. After all, it’s your video. You put it together how you want. You can make that video as unique and as informative as it needs to be, and you can ensure that its title and subject matter match your site’s keyword focused content. The longer your visitors stay on your site, the lower your site’s bounce rate and consequently, the higher your site’s “stickiness”. Consider it a constant feedback loop, one where each visit to your site is maximized. More time spent on an individual page increases the value of that page, and means your visitor is more likely to investigate your site further.

Video works today because it aims to provide users with an inside view into your site and what it has to offer. If structured properly, your video can be focused around your site’s unique value proposition. Video SEO can also help to promote the content, especially if the content includes those keywords most sought after by your potential customers in online searches. The title of the video is everything, but the content within the video speaks volumes!

Image Credit

Why is Video so important for SEO? is a post from: SEO, PPC & Social Media Training & Consultancy

WordPress is a fantastic blogging and content management system but there are ways to make it even better by using the right plugins. The ability to upload video and other multimedia is becoming a necessity for many and whether you are just looking for a quick and simple way to embed a Youtube or Vimeo video into a post or need a more complex solution for your WP video goals, there’s probably a plugin that can help you achieve the desired results. The following list of free and premium plugins should give you a heads up in your search for the best WordPress video plugin for your needs:

 Smart YouTube Pro WordPress Plugin

A great plugin, probably one of the the best YouTube integration plugins available. Smart YouTube Pro allows you to very easily embed and also customise YouTube videos and/or playlists in your post, and also in your comments and RSS feed. If that wasn’t enough, it also works on the iPad & iPhone, produces xHTML valid code (unlike YouTube embed code) and allows you to view videos in fullscreen mode.

Features:

– Plays YouTube, Vimeo, Metacafe
– Supports latest high quality video protocols (360p and HD quality 720p)
- Supports video deep linking (starting at desired point with &start=time parameter, use &start=num parameter)

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Video Player WordPress Plugin – £13.50 for a regular licence

This plugin doesn’t come free but is affordable enough at $21 for a regular lience. Aimed at the user who needs a more featured packed solution, this plugin will help you administer the entire video player via a client friendly control panel. As an added bonus for your money, you can customize the look & feel, the playlist and CSS file if required.

Features:

– Supports FLV /H.264 encoded video : MP4 , M4V, M4A , MOV, Mp4v, F4V
– RTMP (using FMS or RED5 ) and RTMP live streaming

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Cool Video Gallery

Cool Video Gallery has an option to upload videos and manage them in multiple galleries. It also has an automatic preview image generation for uploaded videos and the player can be customised.

Features:

– Supports H.264 (.mp4, .mov), FLV (.flv) and MP3 (.mp3) files
– Option to show single videos in page/post content using embed feature
- Google XML Video Sitemap generation feature integrated.

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VidEmbed - £13 for a regular licence

Vidembed allows you to easily add videos to pages, posts, and widget areas. It supports both self hosted videos and those from external sites.

Features:

– Supports .mp4, .mov & .flv files
– Embed YouTube & Vimeo videos.
- Supported sites: Youtube, Vimeo, Yahoo Video, Dailymotion, Metacafe, Viddler, Blip.tv,  Twitcam, Livestream, Ustream
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Viper’s Video Quicktags

This plugin will allow you to embed directly from one of 12 video publishing platforms rather than bother with all that tedious copy and pasting
Features:

– Supports .mp4, .mov, .wmv, mpeg, avi & .flv files
- Supported sites: Youtube, Vimeo, Veoh, Google Video, Dailymotion, Metacafe

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There are also other plugins that may suit your needs:

WordPress Video Lightbox

YouTube Videobox Widget

Lightbox Evolution for WordPress – £11.50 for a regular licence

ProPlayer

WP YouTube Player

Youtube Embedder

Have a play around with the plugins and find the one that suits your needs – there’s really no point in going for the full bells and whistles option if all you want to do is embed a YouTube video once or twice a month. However, those of you who are more comfortable with extra features will appreciate some of the customization that the more advanced plugins can offer. Above all though, don’t forget to back up any multimedia you upload, whichever plugin you choose.

11 Great WordPress Plugins for Video is a post from: SEO, PPC & Social Media Training & Consultancy

Eric Schmidt of Google has confirmed recently in an interview that social media activity is a ranking signal for Google search. Earlier confirmations were still a bit vague and unofficial. I already predicted that soon it will be one of the main factors in the Google algorithm as links become less and less reliable. For years some people in the SEO industry denied that you need social media at all for SEO.

Now that we know for sure that we have to use social media also for SEO reasons, we have to ask ourselves How to use social media for SEO in 2012?

What is social media?

Social media is Internet based media that facilitates conversation. You probably think Facebook or Twitter and you’re right. There are also social media sites geared towards specific content like YouTube or Flickr or content curation sites like Delicious and Blekko. Most importantly though, social media does not have to be large third party sites. Your blog, forums or feedback communities are social media as well. For business people these social media are the most important ones.

What social media are important for SEO today?

In 2005 Digg and Delicious were important for SEO, both for large traffic spikes and many links at once. In 2012, Facebook is the largest social media site, everybody knows it. Is it also the most important one for SEO as well? Well, not really.

Facebook can bring large numbers of visitors to your site and it’s great to socialize with your fans or friends but it’s not a reliable or steady traffic source. You can’t depend on it for converting traffic or for link building. Most of Facebook can’t get indexed by Google so that most of the likes and shares do not count at all as links.

For SEO you need to look first at what you specialize in and then decide what social media sites are suitable for you.

 

In general they have to be indexed by Google (naturally) to help you directly with your Google SEO. Google+ is new but it’s good to establish a presence on there now but also look to wider opportunities:

1. As a photographer you probably need to use Flickr and Tumblr
2. As a journalist Twitter and YouTube is your friend
3. As a recruiter you have to focus on LinkedIn and maybe Xing
4. As a musician you probably want to use MySpace, BandCamp and SoundCloud
5. As a local small business owner you might need to take a look at Qype, Yelp and Fousquare

For all of the above, one social medium is a must have though, no, it’s not Facebook, it’s your own blog. In the best case you also host it yourself instead of Blogger or WordPress.com

Without a blog you are not really participating in social media, you are just a spectator, someone that visits other people’s sites and spends your time providing content for them. Some of the above mentioned sites are better equipped to assist you with your SEO efforts than others but without a blog there is no real connection between the social sites themselves and your static site.

The blog is like an interface, like a secretary who welcomes potential visitors. You can’t send casual social media visitors to a static site that just sells something or offers services. People want to see informing, witty, intriguing or eye opening content they can engage with – at least comment on.

How do we approach social media?

Remember, social media is just a way of getting found – not a way of spending your time.  The day has only 24h and you can’t spend all of it on social media sites. However, you must secure your branded profiles on most social sites even though you may only focus on a handful of sites that you really want to contribute to. Oh, and never contribute more on third party sites than on your own blog unless you are guest posting on other blogs.

Social media sites are meant to connect you with others in your industry or niche but not to waste your best content on.

So you have to publish your content on your own blog first for it to get exposure on social media. The best way to get exposure is not blatant self promotion but outreach and participation.

Find out who the influencers in your industry are by using Klout and then socialize with these people or contact them directly.

• Sharing their content
• replying to their questions
• or simply chatting with them

is often enough. After a while a relationship or at least a familiarity ensues and once you publish your post they may retweet or reshare it as well. That’s the point where your SEO has worked out. A share on social sites counts for Google as well but you have to treat the sites themselves as well as “search engines”. People use them to find your content more or less actively.

It’s also important to curate and share content by others on a regular basis. This way you can establish yourself as an expert an gain an audience.

What does SEO mean in the context of social media?

SEO on social media is not about creating hundreds of profiles to get backlinks or the automated flooding of Twitter with your links. It’s not about “submitting to” hundreds of “social bookmarking” sites. Social media SEO is about establishing yourself, your blog and ultimately your business as an authority in your industry or whatever else you specialize in.

You want to convince people who are not your customers or clients (yet) that they can trust you.

You want to make them share and spread your links for you not because they feel obliged to or get paid for it but because you’re awesome. In order to become awesome you have to follow the people who are already awesome at doing what you do and at least match them. You will quickly find out by searching for such people on Google, Topsy or Blekko.

Social media in 2012 is about creating solid relationships and creating content that others will naturally share because they find it so useful.

* CC image by Matt Hintsa

How to Use Social Media for SEO in 2012 is a post from: SEO, PPC & Social Media Training & Consultancy

Dependent on where you are in the world, other video sites are also proving very popular with businesses and video marketers. Hulu is a great site for movies and television but is currently only available in the U.S.A.

Another popular site and the third most visited of all the video sites is The Daily Motion, which might sound like something you’d rather not be aware of but is actually a site similar to YouTube which gets about 27,000,000 unique hits a month. We like this site as its categories are really easy to navigate and their daily viral is a great summary of what’s on the video news block this week.

If you are a video maker as opposed to just observer, Vimeo has to be the best site by far to share your creative outputs. Described as a respectful community for sharing, Vimeo offers the best video tools in the universe – their words not ours!

Of course there is still MySpace and though people may snigger and say ‘MyWho?’, Myspace still commands a massive amount of traffic and has a great music focus for bands and small business.

For business, you can share your videos on Facebook & Twitter, your own blog or website, Tumblr and Google+. Get a great video doing the social media rounds and you stand a much better chance of it going viral.

Other great video websites include Metacafe, Vivi, LiveLeak, Videobash and Break.com. If you are looking for platforms to share your video clips etc, these are all excellent choices.

It’s Not All About YouTube : Alternative Video Platforms is a post from: SEO, PPC & Social Media Training & Consultancy

A few weeks after the so called Google Freshness Update most people in the SEO industry are still coping with it and trying to assess the outcome. There are some useful resources out there already but I missed a post dealing with actual measures you can undertake now as a webmaster or website owner to deal with the update.

Thus I decided to collect such obvious techniques and strategies for SEO after the Google Freshness update. By techniques I mean short term tactics to quickly appear and rank in fresh results and by strategies obviously long term changes to appeal to the new freshness algorithm repeatedly.

While during most of 2011 large numbers of SEO practitioners focused on the so called Panda update and accordingly deal with quality issues the freshness update focuses again on quantity.

You can’t write one huge resource now and rely on it to rank for a particular keyword forever in many cases. For seasonal or time-sensitive queries you will need current updates or rather new articles. On the other you still can’t just publish all the time, like a post every hour just to get ranked as the most current one.

The freshness update does not mean that Google already gives up its focus on high quality sites. What we see is that authority sites, in most cases news outlets known for serving news in general or in a particular niche appear more often in top positions.

In a way the search results for some queries now look as if Google News and Google search results have been mixed without the “news” being highlighted in an extra “Universal search” kind of way.

Currently some Google News results appear both on top as “Universal” and in the regular results as well though.

 Writing  shorter posts

In the early days of blogging blog posts were short. They often contained just a link and a short descriptive sentence. This kind of blogging has moved to places like Facebook, Twitter or Tumblr over the years. Blogs are now places where sometimes huge resources or at least well written articles get published. That’s great, but everyone does it and for most major queries a few a-list blogs dominate the results along with the usual suspects like Wikipedia, Amazon, BBC or other news sites. So sometimes writing a shorter post with a more nuanced title and headline may be the solution.

Splitting postings

It might also be a good idea to split a larger post. Instead of writing about the 101 link building techniques you could write a weekly or even daily column about one idea each time. Search terms like “link building” or “link building techniques” are not a good example though. On Google.com I see a more than 5 year old post when I search for [link building]. First you have to find out which queries are considered deserving freshness by Google and which not. Google itself suggests topics like sports or current events but also gadgets or cars as likely to be affected by the Google freshness algo.

So what are other common sense techniques and strategies to deal with the new Google freshness algorithm? Let me start with the long term and then add some quick and clean ways to refresh your blog or site at once.
Strategies:

1. Set up a blog or update your existing blog more often with shorter posts.
2. React to current developments and write news, not only timeless resources.
3. Use your content from social media sites you wasted until now as UGC for your own blog or site by importing it. Use Google+ or Twitter as a CMS.
4. Add guest authors for your publication and let them submit articles you only have to review.
5. Consider curating content and publishing the resources instead of creating it yourself.
6. Get your whole team to write and participate in the social media conversation.
7. Define what quality means in your industry, does it mean research, testing or is wit and humour maybe enough? Not every post has to be a flagship post.
8. Don’t be afraid to repeat yourself. The truth or helpful advice doesn’t get stale.
9. Hire or pay real business, bloggers, writers or journalists, do not just rely on your team members who have lots of other responsibilities.
10. Use and highlight real names of authors to gain authority and to transfer it from authors already known and respected.

Techniques:

1. Find out which search queries in your niche are affected by the freshness update and which not by simp,ly searching for your keywords.
2. Set up a weekly or daily column dealing with one topic like e.g. “Daily Link Building”.
3. Do not compromise your content quality, just reduce the size in order to get more timely.
4. Watch Google News, Google Insights, Google Trends and Google Hot Trends for spikes in keyword popularity.
5. Use metaphors like “The Manchester United Way of Practising SEO” to piggyback on current events.
6. In cases where you can’t add something relevant to the latest news comment on them, express your opinion.
7. Update old postings regularly and check for broken links automatically. Once you discover a 404 fix it ASAP.
8. Update your WordPress installation quickly and react to other issues Google shows you in Webmaster Tools.
9. Reshare your older updated postings on social media to get fresh social signals.
10. Create content in advance for seasonal and other predictable events and publish them when the news is hot.

As you see, these pieces of advice above are not about technical SEO or some gimmicks. It’s mostly about good old content creation and newsworthy things to cover. Google relies on fresh content and thus you have to give it to the search engine to please it. Do you have any suggestions for other improvements in the light of the Google freshness update and the still very important high quality update aka Panda? Add them in the comment section!

More resources on the Google freshness update and its ramifications for SEO:

• Does Google Freshness Update Make Online Reputation Management (ORM) More Difficult? | Adam Sherk
• Methods for Evaluating Freshness | Justin Briggs
• Google’s New Freshness Update: Social Media Has Changed the Expectations of Searchers
• Official Google Blog: Giving you fresher, more recent search results
• Google’s “Freshness” Update – Whiteboard Friday | SEOmoz
• Categorizing Your Content Creation for Optimal Freshness and Quality | The Search Agents
• Google Fresh: How Will It Affect Your Site?
• Google Freshness Update : The real winners & losers

* Creative Commons image by Matthew Fang.

SEO after the Google Freshness Update: Techniques and Strategies is a post from: SEO, PPC & Social Media Training & Consultancy

When looking at the most recent changes of Google’s ranking algorithm for it’s organic search you will notice that it’s not just about the algo anymore. In 2011 it became obvious that Google takes more and more usage signals into account when ranking websites. The recently leaked Google quality rater guidelines prove that as well. The 125 pages long PDF document often mentions “usefulness” or in other words usability as a major factor to determine whether a site is spam or not.

In case you didn’t know yet: For years Google has employed so called quality raters, that is real people who view and rate search results.

This year, with the so called Panda update, the quality raters were asked to identify spam or low quality sites beforehand and based on their feedback the algorithm has been “improved” or the rankings of particular websites have been lowered in most cases.

In its recent pr campaign to convince users that Google cares for privacy Google declares on their “Good to Know” microsite that

“by analyzing the search logs of millions of users in aggregate, we can continually improve our search algorithm”.

What does this mean from the SEO perspective? They look at actual searches people make and whether they seem satisfied with the results. They check whether users actually click the results they see and then whether searchers stay on the page they clicked on or instead return to the Google results page to try other results or searches. When a 1000 people ignore a result in #1 or return immediately to Google after clicking it it might end up lower in the search results next time.

These are just some of the ways Google gets gets data it can use to derive quality signs from pages: The Google Chrome browser sends usage data all the time to Google even when you don’t click anything.

Google admitted earlier this year that they use Google toolbar data to improve search quality.

• Google Analytics
• Google Webmaster Tools
• DoubleClick tracking cookies
• the search history of logged in users
• Google cookies
• Google +1 buttons

and all kinds of other smaller data sources allow Google to collect a myriad of signals the search giant can harvest.

On the other hand links, the old king of ranking signals have in recent years become less and less accurate and important. People trading and buying links were making web links less reliable to measure website authority. Actual users link less and less and use social sites like Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn instead. Google can’t access these links (likes or tweets) directly.

So it’s obvious that in the near future soft ranking signals based on actual usage will dominate the Google search algorithm.

This data is difficult to manipulate and it does not depend on webmasters but on the search users themselves. You can buy links but you can’t buy lower bounce rates or higher click through rates. Of course you could trap users on your site and force them to stay longer or perform actions that prevent them from bouncing but I’m pretty sure you won’t get away with such a tactic for long.

How can you optimize for soft ranking signals?

Well, you need to extend the scope of your website optimization techniques to those that were already part of it in the past before SEO got more and more focused on hard algorithm based ranking factors like the number, authority, position or anchor text text of links. Long before Google announced that it considers website load speed to be a ranking factor website optimization was about making files as small as possible to alleviate the drawbacks of the World Wide Wait as the early modem driven Internet was referred to.

You can learn even more from the early Web.

There were no heavy animations or complex scripts. Likewise users and thus Google can’t stand obstacles in their way when wanting to reach a goal on a page. They want the information they seek quickly. In case they can’t get it or even see it due to excessive clutter you lose them. The big difference us that Google can take these factors into account by now. Some of them don’t even need actual people aka quality raters to look at your site. Some metrics like the ads to content ratio that is one of the more important factors after Panda can measured without human interference especially as the ads are served by Google as well in many cases.

On the other hand many of the new major soft signals are really soft and can’t be computed by robots only so Google will extend the amount of user testing. You might assume that they can’t test all the billions of sites out there but after the Google we have witnessed how many leading sites in specific niches have been obviously reviewed and reranked accordingly. Some sites that have been mistakenly downranked have been manually reviewed again and reinstated.

So while your site will be most probably spidered by robots again it might get manually visited by someone who will look at it and make rank better or worse after flagging it either useful or spam. So you better approach SEO with this perspective in mind. Just imagine a friendly but clueless  Google intern visiting you. Make sure s/he understands what your site is about and how it help to accomplish the task it’s optimized for.

Make your site

• fast
• light-weight
• clean
• to the point
• readable
• enticing
• in-depth

to keep on ranking high. Google just mimics real user behavior.

* CC image by cobalt123.

Soft Ranking Signals Will Dominate the Near Future of Google Search is a post from: SEO, PPC & Social Media Training & Consultancy

All very positive news for SEOs and site owners, but are you really squeezing everything you can out of that video? Here are some more ideas to make that content work as hard as possible for you:

Transcribe the audio

If your video has a voice over, you’re missing a huge quick win if don’t use the script as a standalone feature. Using a service like speakertext.com, or finding people via oDesk, you can easily get that voice over transcribed into text which can be used in a number of ways.  For instance, if you are hosting the video on your site (and if you aren’t WHY NOT? Just embed the YouTube video you have already uploaded), then you can add the text below the video. Not only does this provide the user with extra content but it also gives the search engines a focus for the page, and that’s good for rankings. You can also offer the text/transcription as a downloadable pdf file.

Turn the audio into a podcast

If the voice over works without the images, then consider turning the audio file into a podcast.

Use various screenshots as images

Take screenshots from the video to support the text content or to upload to your account on Flickr – remember the alt tags!

Powerpoint

Why not turn the images/text into a powerpoint presentation and create inbound links by uploading to sites like slideshare.net.

Annotations

Use the YouTube annotations feature to add extra commentary to your videos. These are great for adding value to the video, or adding extra thought etc after the video has been made.

Video is here to stay and thank goodness for that as it’s a very powerful medium for any marketing campaign. Re-purposing video content into many other mediums will give you many extra opportunities for brand building, attracting inbound links, distribution via social media, emails and newsletters so really take the time to investigate how hard your video content can really work for you.

Make your video work harder for you is a post from: SEO, PPC & Social Media Training & Consultancy

Even with the growing importance of social media one of the most significant tasks of SEO specialists is traditional link building. By traditional I refer to real a href links on websites and blogs not social media mentions on Facebook, Twitter or Google+

Links usually vary in quality to the point where one link looking similar to another can be worthless while the other one is a so called authority link.

How do you know which link is worthwhile? You can take a look at numerous factors to assess and evaluate the value of a link. Of course you scrutinize not only the link itself but also the page it is on and the site as a whole. Last but not least the link profile of the site that links to you also determines whether it’s a good link or not.

Let me explain some of the numerous link value metrics I use daily by now. Some of them I recognize at a glance while others I only discover when I dig deeper than the obvious appearance. Here’s my checklist. At the bottom I list some tools for link evaluation as well.

Site level link value factors

• indexed? – Is the site in the Google index? Check using a search like site:example.com on Google. It has to be. Otherwise hands off.
• PageRank? – Does the site have PageRank? No matter how much it just needs at least a PR of one so that you know it’s not completely new, banned or worthless.
• MozRank – While PageRank is by and large deprecated you can use mozRank by SEOmoz to find out the value of a site.
• site topic – What is the site about and is it relevant to you and your site? The more relevant the better.
• language – Does the language of the site match the language of the page it links to? When they match great, when they don’t it depends.
• editorial or automated? – Is this site run by real people writing articles or is it just an automated aggregator? The less automation the better for the link.
• regularly updated? – Is the site regularly updated, or at least from time to time? Unless it’s a timeless resource it’s bad when it isn’t.
• ppp = Does the site deal with pills, pron or poker? Cheap medicine, xxx an gambling sites are a bad neighborhood for most other links.

Page level link value factors

• indexed? – Is the page the link is on in the Google index? Search with the “site:” operator again. Not indexed. No good.
• cached? – Has the page been cached by Google? Use the “cache:” operator. When? A week ago is great. A month ago is OK. In case it’s not there the page does not seem to be important.
• number of outgoing links – The fewer the better. Almost none are also bad though.
• mozRank – Look at the page authority as well as measured by SEOmoz.
• topic – Does the page deal with the topic your resource it links to does? Or is off topic? The more on topic the better.
• hidden or low quality links – Does the page contain hidden or low quality links? Some third party services sneak in hidden links for example. The popular Hello bar does. Are there dozens of footer links with overtly optimized anchor texts? Not a good sign either.
• unique content – Does the page have unique content? Search for the headline or the first sentence in Google. In case Wikipedia comes up first it’s worthless. When the site ranks one #1 for its content and has many copycats that’s OK. In case dozens of newspapers publish the same content that’s a clear sign of low quality.
• broken links – Does the page contain broken links? A few, like two or three out of 30 might already be a bad sign.
• bad neighborhood – Does the page link to many low quality sites like defunct domains that are parking now? Then the link is in no good context.

Link level value signals

• text or image? – Is the link a text link or an image link? Text links are better.
• anchor text – What kind of anchor text does the link have? Does it sound natural or spammy?
• placement on page head/text/sidebar/footer – Where on the page is the actual link? Is it on top, in the editorial part of the content, in the sidebar or in the worst case in the footer? On top and in the editorial part is best.
• html vs javascript – Is the link an actual link with a href in it or a JavaScript link? Does the JavaScript have the target URL in it or just some mangled code?
• font size and CSS declarations – Is the link text so tiny that you need a magnifying glass? Does its color have enough contrast to be readable? Is the position left: -1000px? All of the above are awful.
• nofollow attribute – Does the link have a rel=nofollow attribute added to it? If yes, why? Nofollow means the link does not count for Google.
• URL forwarding and cloaked links – Does the link use a server side script or redirect instead of linking directly? In most cases it’s breaking it unless it uses a so called 301 redirect and the page that does the actual redirecting can be indexed.

All of these aspects might seem a bit too much to take into account but I see many of them immediately while others get displayed by my tools within the browser. To analyze links more thoroughly you can use Google Webmaster Tools (for your own site), Blekko, Screaming SEO Spider and cognitiveSEO tools.

As I work as a blogger for cognitiveSEO I’m a bit biased towards the advanced SEO tools they offer.

You can gain a quick overview over multiple of the link value factors I mentioned above and some more I haven’t.

The free tools from Google, Blekko and Screaming Frog are also great but it costs a bit more time to get a grip on your links using them. Also the information is not as complete. For beginners and intermediate users they will most probably suffice. Professional users, for instance inhouse SEO practicioners or webmasters having multiple websites can save lots of time and effort using the web based cognitiveSEO software.

Do you agree with my link value metrics checklist? Do you have something to add? Do you use other tools to evaluate links?

* CC image by Lance McCord.

How to Evaluate Links – A Checklist + Tools is a post from: SEO, PPC & Social Media Training & Consultancy

One of the most important factors of SEO is the right domain name. Likewise, you need a domain name that represents and creates your brand. It’s also quite difficult to reconcile branding and SEO in many cases. In this post I’d like to show you how you can come up with a domain name that is both great for ranking in Google and to get a memorable and recognizable brand on the Web.

Usually nowadays everybody already owns a domain. So you have to ask yourself whether you really need a new one.

There are reasons to get a new one, a merger or an expansion might be one. A new trend or a website relaunch are not necessarily reasons to get a new domain name. Always remember that moving your online real estate is a risky endeavor for both SEO and branding.

Before choosing your actual domain name you have to consider at least three major questions about your business.

What is your business model?

Your business model is not only how you earn money but also what you offer and to whom. Are you a small business owner or a startup entrepreneur? Do you sell local services or do you ship worldwide? Do you depend on online lead generation or sales or do you need a website for branding purposes? Is this going to be a major or even most important website or just microsite among many others? How long will it be in use a year, a decade or as long as possible? A decade might sound like much but my first domain has been created exactly ten years ago and it still works for me despite changing business models.

What is your image?

Do people already know you and your company? Do they associate you with a specific product or service? Do they know where you’re business is located? Do people already like and trust you? An image can mean a lot of things or rather connotations. What name do people use when describing you? Do they know your brand name? Do you have a personal brand? Are the people who work for you your loyal brand ambassadors or are they working 8 hrs in an Asian sweatshop? Do you sell status symbols?

What is your market?

What market do you want to serve? Do you want to attract the youth or the senior citizenship? Do you want to reach an US or UK audience? Do you want to expand to France, Germany or even to Asia? Are your customers women or men or both? Are your customers one time buyers or do they return for more ideally? Do these people want to get the cheapest product or service available or do they prefer quality? Maybe your audience even pays you for the good name. Or do you sell at all? Maybe you want to set up a church site or a need a domain name for an NGO?

You see there are lots and lots of questions to ask yourself before deciding on the best possible domain name for both SEO and branding.

Branding doesn’t have to mean a famous logo.

Branding on the Internet can mean that people remember your real name. They may consider you an expert as a person, no matter your actual brand name is. You have to find out who you are as a business person and what your business is all about.

Once you analyzed your own business the actual process of selecting a domain name starts.

Using and choosing keywords that describe your business

To make a domain SEO friendly you need to add keywords to it don’t you? It isn’t that simple though. Too many or the wrong keywords can hurt you more than they help. Also some keywords interfere with branding. Keyphrases in many cases are already too much. In order to achieve the best possible combination of SEO and branding you take just one major keyword that stands for your business in a rather general way. Of course you have to perform a keyword research first to find out.

Many people in the SEO industry for instance choose the term SEO itself.

SEOmoz, SEOBook or SEOptimise are well known brands with matching domain names. Once they start offering more than SEO services this keyword might backfire. Some people may consider SEO specialists not capable of offering good social media services. Thus Sorbet Digital for example has chosen an even “bigger” term, digital as in digital marketing to its brand and domain name.

Takeaways:

Avoid keyword stuffing in the domain name itself. seoppcsocialmediaservices.co.uk

Do not name your domain after just one service or product you offer unless it’s a microsite or have substantial resources to build up a few domain names with separate content and markets.

brands and name brands

One of the most renowned UK SEO agencies uses a domain called David Naylor. In the US there is Bruce Clay, likewise a huge personal brand in the SEO industry. So a real name of the founder can serve as the domain name. You don’t have to use keywords at all when your name is already known to stand for excellence ion a particular field. On the other hand they don’t rank for some generic keywords they aim for.

Consider adding your brand to your generic keyword or the other way around.

Depending on your current image or the one you want to achieve add your brand name first or second. Let’s say your name is Naylor and you want to start a new online business. There are a few other Naylors out there already. So people searching just for the name might not find you immediately.  NaylorSEO.com would be a good choice in this case. NaylorPlumbing.co.uk or NaylorEngineering.com

Not all names are made to be used in domain names. Too common or strange names are no good because the branding effect is almost zero. Brand names that sound too similar to many others can also rather distract than help identifying your company. My name for instance is Szewczyk and nobody outside of Poland who isn’t a Pole can spell or pronounce it. People on the Web call me Chef to simplify it but I’m not working at a restaurant so I can’t use this short nick name for the domain either.

modifiers

Many low quality SEO service providers just go after more complex keyphrases to get search traffic from Google. They buy domain names like best-seo-company-india.biz or cheapseoservicesonline.info – This do,main strategy might work in case you buy 500 domain names like these and have 500 drones creating content for them. You don’t want to labeled with modifiers like “best”, “cheap” or even “online”.

These not only sound amateurish, they limit your business model. What if you domain name says “cheap” and want to start selling high end packages? Naming yourself “best” is the worst idea. Only others can judge whether you’re really the best in something. This is just mindless bragging.  As the site is already on the Web adding “online” to its web address is nonsense. It just sounds like you haven’t found a domain name because all the good ones were already taken.

length

The shorter the domain the better. Just consider a domain name like t.co which is the default Twitter URL shortener. I didn’t really have to memorize this one. On the other hand you can’t fit most keywords or brand names into such a short domain name. So even if you could get such a short domain it wouldn’t be ideal in many cases. Of course there are exceptions, SEO.com was a high profile domain sale and still has worked out for the company that now uses it.

For all those not lucky enough to able to pay millions for a rare .com domain a name and keyword combination might be the perfect length. Let’s assume you’re name is Brown: seobrown.com is perfect.

spelling

Some things like my name above are hard to spell. SEO itself is for those who don’t know the acronym. So consider to remove difficult to spell abbreviations when you’re audience is not just a bunch of experts. Some words also collide with each other. Consider a name like whoretweetedme.com which is an actual service. This one might even get censored in some cases. Even a combination like jonesseo.com can lead to misspellings.

TLD – .com or .biz?

In the US you should still at least try to get .com domain. In the UK your first choice will co.uk, in France .fr and in Germany .de Do you want to serve several markets then again .com is best but what happens when the .com domain you want is not available? Some Top Level Domains like .info or .biz have a bad rep. Many spam sites have used .biz and .info domains so it’s more difficult to SEO such a domain. Also many people assume that you use the default domain name of your country or .com so .info or .biz domain are quite exotic.

Sometimes an exotic domain can be actually great for SEO though. TLDs like .tv, .to, .me or .is for example can be very easy to memorize. On the other hand a domain .ly can be a bad choice as it stands for Libya: First it was a dictatorship and then a war zone. Unless you are a gangster rapper don’t use .biz as it sound like slang.

hyphens and numbers

When remembering a domain name or telling someone else about it actually saying the domain name will not be enough. You have to say there is a hyphen or minus or have to explain that the number is an actual number and not a word. In some languages, especially English the hyphen is an awkward symbol. Most numbers are as annoying in domain names. Last bit not least many spammers use both hyphens and numbers in their domain names so your site does not look trustworthy. There are notable exceptions here as well, 500px.com is one.

I haven’t covered every aspect of choosing a SEO friendly domain. There are a few articles on SEO and domains from SEO industry icons on the Web already. Some of them are already a bit dated but the advice is still valid. Check them out as well:

• 12 Rules for Choosing the Right Domain Name | SEOmoz
• How to Choose a New Domain – Graywolf’s SEO Blog
• How To Choose Domain Names For SEO | SEO Book.com
• How to Choose a Domain Name | SEO Theory
• How To Choose A Domain Name | Keyword Research Comes First | SEO Innovation

* CC image by Thomas Hawk.

How to Select a Domain for SEO and Branding is a post from: SEO, PPC & Social Media Training & Consultancy

The overwhelming numbers of webpages means companies and individuals must employ sophisticated SEO practices to gain any kind of visibility and an SEO audit should be performed at the start of any marketing campaign to ensure that potential customers can discover a company’s website without having to dig through hundreds of search engine results.

Competent SEO audits may check a website’s:

- backlinks
- cache dates
- crawl frequency
- pages
- top-level domain and sub-domains

An audit will also judge a website’s unique content, overall architecture, and performance metrics.

After a website has undergone an audit, businesses will know where to make specific improvements in their SEO practices. Companies on the first page of a search see the most traffic, but that traffic diminishes as the rankings decrease.  An SEO audit can help companies increase website traffic and possible sales by improving their SEO practices.

Because search engines are constantly tweaking their algorithms, businesses should regularly update their SEO practices and an annual SEO audit ensures that a website can remain competitive with other companies’ sites.

A SEO audit will not be the only deciding factor between a company’s success or failure on the Internet but it can help determine whether or not a company has a visible presence for customers to discover. Google has indexed more than a trillion possible competitors, so companies avoid performing a SEO audit at their own risk.

An SEO Audit is the First Step to Online Marketing Success is a post from: SEO, PPC & Social Media Training & Consultancy