YouTube and SEO

Many people are surprised to learn that YouTube is the second-largest search engine. Yep, it’s bigger than Yahoo and bigger than Bing, according to comScore. Therefore it is a shock to many search marketing professionals that clients, including large brands, neglect to formulate or act on strategies for YouTube optimization.

Of course, YouTube isn’t a perfect fit for every company, but anybody who does business online should consider taking advantage of the huge opportunities for brand impressions available on YouTube. Even if the product or service you sell might be considered dry or boring, think about creating a series of funny or interesting videos that relates indirectly to your core business.

For example, if you sell construction equipment, you could produce videos of stunt drivers doing freestyle tricks in a Bobcat. Or perhaps a clothing company could create video fashion shows of embarrassing styles that were once popular. You don’t have to create traditional TV commercials to get people talking about your brand.

Optimizing YouTube pages requires you to follow the same rules as any other search engine optimization (SEO) project, and all SEO can be broken down into three disciplines: content, linking, and architecture. Since YouTube is going to dictate how the page is built architecturally, that leaves you with opportunities to improve the on-page content that boosts the link popularity of the page. We’ll leave the linking discussion for another day, and of course the video itself needs to be good enough for people to actually want to watch it. The following tips are designed to help you optimize your YouTube pages in a way that makes them as easy to find as possible. Therefore, we will primarily be talking about what to put on the page and where to put it.

Considering that YouTube streams more than 1.2 billion videos every day, it’s easy to write it off as oversaturated and move on. But most of the content is garbage, and few people take the time to properly optimize their submissions.

There are primarily two places you can rank well for your target keywords. The first place is on YouTube itself. For example, if I type “Dwayne Johnson” into the search bar, the results are my choice of “All,” “Channels,” and “Playlists,” with the default view being “All.” It is possible to sort the results a number of different ways, but the default sorting method is “Relevance,” so the way you see results on a YouTube page is similar to how you might see them on other search engines.

The other place your videos can rank well is on the search engines themselves. Remember that every video on YouTube has its own page, called a view page, that can be optimized the same as any other page on the web.

The most important thing to remember about optimizing for YouTube is that the videos themselves are invisible to search engines. YouTube converts the video files you upload into Flash, and search engines have a difficult time understanding what’s inside a Flash file, especially a video. If you need proof, simply view Google’s cached version of any YouTube page and you’ll see only the text that accompanies the video, not the video itself. This exercise demonstrates how important the surrounding content is to the page’s potential ability to rank for your target keywords.

YouTube automatically generates meta tags for every view page. The name of the video becomes the title tag, the description (found in the “more info” section) becomes the meta description tag, and the YouTube tags become the content of the page’s meta keywords tag. Of course, Google has publicly stated that its search engine ignores the meta keywords tag, so this feature of YouTube doesn’t make lots of sense – but nobody’s perfect.

There are two types of YouTube channels: brand channels and user channels. Brand channels are given out to advertisers who spend a lot of money on YouTube, and these have some distinct advantages over user channels, including auto-play when a user lands on the view page, multiple sub-channels, a 960×150 banner, a 300×250 side column image, a branding box, contest module support, support for YouTube’s Carousel, Video Walls, custom gadgets, a larger background image, and support for Google Analytics. But since most of us will be stuck with plain old user channels, the following tips are written for the average user. Additionally, YouTube has great help files for customizing your user channel. Google’s YouTube help page is a good place to start.

Quick tips for optimization

• Include links in profile pages wherever possible. First decide where you want to drive the traffic from your channel/profile page, and then include links to those pages as much as possible. Ideally, you will be linking to other social media profiles like Facebook and Twitter in order to extend the social media experience, but you also might want to drive clicks to a customized landing page. There are many more opportunities to place clickable links than there appear to be at first glance.
• Include appropriate keywords in the name of the video, and use the word “video” when appropriate. The title is the most important piece of information that the search engines have about your video, and considering that most searchers include the word “video” when searching for a video, this inclusion boosts the relevance of your page as a search result.
• For each video, write a unique, keyword-rich description that includes a URL. Put the URL at the beginning. This way, even when the “more info” option is collapsed, the user will still see the link. Also, a video’s description is the next-best indicator to search engines of the video’s content, right behind the title. Use this space to place relevant keywords when appropriate.
• Provide video transcripts if possible. Until the technology improves, YouTube and other online videos are practically invisible to most search engines. Therefore, the search engines are only guessing about the content of your video based on the information they parse from the title, description, and tags. But if you have a full transcript of your video placed in the description, the search engines will fully understand the video.
• Take advantage of YouTube’s captions and annotation features. You can add notes, subtitles, descriptions, and links directly over the top of the video. Currently only links to other YouTube pages are clickable, but try this: You remembered to add a link at the top of your description, right? Place a call to action over the video that says, “Click here to become a fan of our Facebook page.”

• Tag your videos with keywords. Along with the title and the description, tags help the search engines identify the video’s content. If you have relevant keywords, place them here.
• Encourage participation. For each video, there are options for “Broadcasting and Sharing.” It’s best to open commenting and embedding as much as possible, but remember that you will need to monitor your videos for spam and naughty comments. Also consider posting your videos as responses to other popular videos. This is a good way to piggyback on the success of someone else’s video and divert some of those eyes to your own content.
• Watermark your videos. It’s easy with most video editing software to place a small translucent logo in a corner of the video. It’s your video after all, so take ownership.
• YouTube pulls thumbnails from the one quarter, half, and three quarters marks of every video. You can then choose which thumbnail is displayed. If it’s not disruptive to do so, try to manipulate your video so that a compelling image appears at one of these points. Thumbnails have a large impact in a video’s click-through.
• Take advantage of YouTube Insights. This analytics feature of YouTube is robust compared to other video sites and can provide information such as demographics and when people abandoned viewing specific videos. This data can help you improve future submissions.

Who did it great:

College Humor
College Humor has done a good job with its channel design. In the description box, it provides links to other social media profiles. The company also lists the people involved with the production of the videos and links to several awards it has received.

Coca-Cola
This video from Coke does an excellent job of using the description box, not to provide a verbatim transcript of the video (because there is no dialogue), but rather to describe exactly what is happening in the video.

Mistakes to avoid:
Most YouTube videos and channels are not properly optimized, even by big brands. Therefore, there is still tremendous opportunity to rank well on search results pages for many competitive keywords. Perhaps the biggest potential mistake is to close your videos off to sharing. It is vital to let users interact and embed your videos.

Also, resign yourself to the fact that no matter how good your videos are, people are going to say nasty things. As long as comments aren’t profane, negative feedback is good. A mix of negative and positive comments makes the user experience more authentic.

Drew Hubbard is director of promotions and social media at The Search Agency.

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Search for Blogs

Blogs can be effective tools for raising the profile of your product or service — but only if your target audience find them. Search engine optimization (SEO) can be effective for raising the profile of your blog.

Printable Promotions has only had a blog on its site for a month or so. But it’s already made an impact on the company’s search engine rankings. “I did a Google search on ‘reusable folding grocery bag,’” says Stacie Long, the company’s operations manager. “The YouTube video of our product that we posted on our blog came up third or fourth.”

For many small business leaders, blogging can engender feelings of envy and frustration — envy over legendary blogs that draw thousands of daily page views and frustration from the sneaking suspicion that no one out there is reading their own postings. Search engine optimization (SEO) can change that.

“Blogging is a great way to drive users to a site,” says Kelly Cutler, CEO of Internet marketing firm Marcel Media. “It can also help with stickiness, which is an important goal these days. It’s too easy for users to bounce away from your site before they’ve done something valuable like sign up for your newsletter or fill out a form.”

How can you improve your blog’s ranking on search engines? SEO is a complex science, but here are some principles that will help:

Make it crawler-friendly

Search engines dispatch software called crawlers (or sometimes “spiders”) to roam the World Wide Web in search of sites that might be of interest to searchers. One important SEO strategy is to have your blog be easy for the crawlers to find.

“Make sure the software is set up so that posts don’t get buried ten levels deep in your site,” advises Jill Whalen, CEO of High Rankings, an SEO service. “They should be easy to reach so search engines can crawl them.” Whalen also advises using SEO-friendly blog software. “WordPress is probably one of the best for that,” she says.

It’s also smart idea to include links in your posts, both to your own website’s product pages or other information, and to outside websites as well. Why? It’s links to your site, not from your site, that drive search engine rankings — but, Whalen notes, one often begets the other. “It’s a good way to get linking back and forth,” she says. “Other site owners usually check who’s linking to them, so they get to know who you are.” When linking to outside sites, make sure the links open in a new window or tab so that users don’t automatically leave your site whenever they click on a link.

To keyword or not to keyword

Since all searches start with keywords, it seems obvious that including the pertinent keyword as many times as you can in a blog entry should help bring traffic. Not so fast, experts say. “Don’t force keywords into content where they wouldn’t normally be,” Cutler cautions. “That creates a bad user experience, which means people won’t use your blog, and then Google won’t index your blog.” In fact, Marcel Media usually refrains from even telling client bloggers what the top keywords are for their sites. “Blogs are usually better done without that kind of research in mind,” Cutler says.

Instead, she tries to identify blog topics where preferred terms come up naturally. “One of our clients is a hospital and we’ve identified specific areas they want to focus on. We’ve invited doctors who specialize in those areas to participate in blogging. We’re not trying to build content around keywords, but because those doctors work in those areas, we know the keywords will be used.”

If you do decide to do keyword research, Whalen recommends Keyword Discovery or Wordtracker to find what keywords your customers are searching. She also notes that Google’s AdWords offers information on keyword searches that is free to use, even if you’re not an AdWords customer.

But, she advises, don’t just go for the top terms. “Very competitive phrases probably have many sites optimizing for them,” she says. “So you want a phrase that’s less competitive, but still has some people searching it.” If that phrase is specific to your business’s unique value proposition, optimizing on it can be a very powerful tool.

Content is king

“A mistake I’ve seen a lot is that companies think Web 2.0 is like regular advertising space,” Long says. “They treat it like a billboard.”

Instead, make sure you’re providing content that will entertain, amuse, or inform your readers. One way to build traffic is to comment or react to the news of the day as it affects your particular business. “If you’re a bookseller, you might blog about the current lawsuit by J.K. Rowling to block publication of a Harry Potter Lexicon,” Cutler says. If you use this strategy, she adds, “Keep it short, to the point, and keep it opinionated. Don’t just republish news.”

Understanding the connection between blogging and search rankings can inspire busy executives to take the time to blog, Cutler notes. “What I like about blogging is that it stays in the spirit of the Internet, but lets you accomplish SEO goals in the background,” she says. “Content and linking are two of the most powerful Internet marketing tools –and blogging lets you use both in a non-advertising way.”

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Social Media Networks

If your online marketing agency has advised you to have a blog, a Facebook fan page, or a Twitter account so that you can get more content just to attain additional search engine rankings, you might want to stop and ask why. Many online marketing companies suggest these tactics to gain yet another ranking in the search engine results. While this tactic works at first, eventually, if your content isn’t seen as valuable, you’ll lose that search engine ranking.

Even if you manage to attain some higher rankings by implementing some of these online marketing tactics, it ultimately will do you no good if the person clicking on the link sees your content as totally irrelevant and not valuable. All you will have managed to do is align the term “worthless” to your search engine ranking and your site for that particular keyword you’ve implemented the SEO tactics for.

Value is one of the most important things to keep in mind when creating great content that will get audiences in social media communities to interact and engage with you. Without the value to the audience, you will get the inevitable “so what?”

Getting that “so what” means that you really aren’t engaging or even piquing the audience’s interest. Basically, you’re just another marketer attempting to sell another bill of goods to the community you’re trying to engage — or worse, you’re just another SEO trying to scam the search engine rankings to beat the competitor by using social media.

You Don’t Decide the Value, Your Audience Does

The people who read your blog, engage with you on a forum or message board, watch your video, or look at photos in your photo group on Flickr are the people who deem whether that content is valuable to them. You can possibly influence their decision; however, you can’t make that decision for them.

Mistakenly, marketers assume a lot about their audience in social media communities, so this is where companies must be extra diligent. Don’t assume their need or their pain point can be influenced by your own pain points and needs. This is why it’s vital to do the research around the communities you want to engage in and create content for.

Take the ShamWow, for example. The ShamWow is a chamois/towel that supposedly has super absorbent features that makes it superior to all other chamois on the market today. As their spokesman Vince tells in their video on YouTube, “it’s made by Germans and you always know they make great stuff.”

Their site touts this, and their literature and marketing all touts this, but I don’t understand why they find that valuable to mention. As a U.S. consumer, I could care less who makes it (aliens could make it for all I care!) or how great they claim it is (everyone claims their product is awesome).

Show me how it’s going to add value to my life. What pain point will it ease?

What I find of most value about the ShamWow is the part of the video where Vince pours the soda on the carpet and the ShamWow soaks it all up, including down into the carpet padding. That’s value because that hits a pain point with me, having spilled many liquids on my carpet. The fact that the ShamWow even removes the brown color of the soda from the carpet is another pain point that is eased and viewers could find of value.

It could do the same thing for a glass of wine spilled on carpet. Imagine ShamWow doing a whole video about how their product picks up wine stains off of white carpets. Blush wines, zinfandel wines, port wines, cabernet sauvignon wines — all of the “colorful” wines that can leave a huge mess behind if spilled can be effectively cleaned up by the ShamWow. Now if they sent that hypothetical video off to a few wine bloggers, they probably could have a hit because it would provide value by easing a pain point for people who love to drink wine.

What You Deem Valuable Could be Worthless to Your Audience

You may think that PDF spec sheet of the 10 best of features for your product or service is the best marketing slick ever. You’ve spent hours designing the marketing look and feel around it, you want to make sure that it’s on your Web site and it’s put into every sales packet. You believe this is the most valuable piece of content there is to sell your product.

Unfortunately, you aren’t thinking from the end user’s perspective.

A list of specs of features doesn’t do the end user a bit of good if they can’t even figure out how to use your products or services. Many times, companies mistakenly believe that adding more bells and whistles to their products is what customers find valuable. Customers use the product the way it gives them value. Most of the time, the bells and whistles don’t give the value.

Listening to your audience talk about what the best features are of your product in social media communities should give you insight into how to provide them with valuable content. It can also help you improve your marketing efforts to reach and engage more people. Utilizing this kind of knowledge can help your marketing efforts in social media reach new engagement levels.

Content Isn’t Just Text Anymore

Content can take many forms that your audience can find valuable. A simple video showing how to use the basic features of your product can become an invaluable resource to a new customer. In turn, they tell their friends how easy it is to use once your watch the video, which they share with their friends. Then, once those friends see the video, they realize, “Oh yeah, it is easy” and also end up buying your product.

Audio can be just as compelling. Sometimes your audience might not have the time to sit and read your blog or watch a video, but they might have time to download a podcast and listen to it on their drive to or from work. Podcasts can become a valuable resource to an audience that is short on time during the day to sit down and read, but yet has time on their commute to listen to an interview with an expert about the latest research in your related field.

While you may think what you provide your audience or customers is valuable, it would behoove you to take the time out to listen to them in social media communities. Be prepared, though, if you come from a traditional marketing background where slick ad pieces or literature was your way of communicating. You’ll find that those don’t work or aren’t welcomed in social media communities and they’ll let you know that right up front.

Audiences aren’t afraid to tell you if the content you’re putting out is just plain crap or is truly the best thing since sliced bread.

Meet Liana Evans at SES Chicago on December 7-11. Now in its 11th year, the only major Search Marketing Conference and Expo in the Midwest will be packed with 70+ sessions covering PPC management, keyword research, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), social media, local, mobile, link building, duplicate content, video optimization and usability, while offering high-level strategy, keynotes, an exhibit floor, networking events and more.

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Facebook 101

After you’ve mastered the basics of Facebook and set up Facebook fan pages for your business, it’s time to promote your fan pages and identify ways to be found in real time search results.

Is customer loyalty important to you? Have you ever wondered about which sources provide loyal visitors who will repeatedly return to your site?

Chitika analyzed the browsing habits of 33 million unique visitors during September. They found that Facebook provides the most loyal visitors, with 20 percent of those who originate from the social network in turn visiting the site they landed on four or more times in a week. Other notable social media sites include Digg at 16 percent and Twitter at 11 percent.

This should help you feel better about the time you invest marketing on Facebook. Now let’s look at some ways to promote your Facebook fan page.

How to Promote your Facebook Page

A promotion is a good way to reach out to your customers and make them aware of your new Facebook page. Offer a discount or prize drawing for customers who become fans.

Let your fans know that you would like them to share their feedback on your products or services. Be prepared to receive this feedback, good or bad. This should be a given with any type of social media marketing strategy.

When your customers (or fans) interact with you on Facebook, their friends will see those comments on their news feed. This is one way to leverage the power of Facebook as a viral marketing tool. This should attract more fans and prospective customers.

Engagement and Conversation

Many people are fixated on the goal of acquiring new fans. You can’t ignore this metric because the more fans you have, the more successful your campaign is, right? Well, not exactly.

The real goal is to engage your fans in conversation. If you don’t communicate and converse with your fans, then your fan page will become dormant and fans will disperse to other interesting sites.

You must commit to spending time doing this. Set aside the time to read through comments and other posts from your fan base. Many businesses create a fan page with the mentality that “if you build it, they will come” and don’t invest the time to interact with their fans, a lost opportunity.

Facebook provides some great tools to help you engage with your fans. You have the ability to send videos, photos, messages, or links to each fan.

Each time you send out one of these communications, you show up on their personal newsfeed. This helps to keep you and your products or services top of mind with your fan base. Be careful not to “spam” them. Spread out your communication pushes and make them meaningful and relevant.

A cool feature of Facebook is that it also gives you the ability to segment your audience by region, age, and gender. This helps you send the right messages to the right demographic group. Learn who your audience is and plan your messaging strategy around those groups.

Facebook also provides a helpful reporting tool called Insights. This tool helps you understand the various types of content your fans enjoy interacting with.

Also, because you’re encouraging open and honest conversations, you might find that you occasionally get some objectionable posts. Facebook provides tools to help moderate and even block users. But you should plan on how to handle this ahead of time and communicate to your fans up front so they understand the policy.

Regardless, use these tools sparingly. If fans feel their comments are being edited or you’re watering down the Kool-Aid, then it’s less likely they will engage in future conversations.

Being Found in Real Time Search

One advantage to search marketers is that search engines are working with Facebook and Twitter to integrate updates into their search results. Getting found in real-time searches is another strategy for promoting your fan page. Let’s look at some useful tips that should help you show up in these real-time searches.

• Keywords: This is always the place to start. If you’re doing SEO or PPC, then you probably already have a good handle on your targeted keywords. If not, start with keyword research. Include your targeted keywords in your content, updates, and especially your titles. Make sure everyone who updates your Facebook page has a keyword list handy so they can use these keywords as much as possible.
• Research and converse about relevant and interesting content: Take time to “listen” to what people are talking about on your fan page and other sites. Then you can post content that will interest your fan base. Ask a question to spark a relevant and timely conversation. Discuss current events and news if these are relevant to you and your targeted keyword set.
• Many followers: More followers means it’s more likely your content will spread virally and be shared. This also helps generate more impressions of your content.
• Call to action: You might be surprised sometimes by the power of a simple invitation. Invite people to “act.” Ask people to share the content with others. Include buttons like “retweet” or “digg” that help them do this easily. Doing this gets you one click away from showing up on another site and being promoted for more viewers to see.

The principles discussed here can also be used for other social media sites. If other principles have worked for you, please post your experiences below.

Join us for SES Chicago on December 7-11, 2009. Now in its 11th year, the only major Search Marketing Conference and Expo in the Midwest will be packed with 70+ sessions covering PPC management, keyword research, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), social media, local, mobile, link building, duplicate content, video optimization and usability, while offering high-level strategy, keynotes, an exhibit floor, networking events and more.

Ron is President/CEO of Symetri Internet Marketing, which provides strategic SEM consulting and training. Ron is actively involved in the SEM community and speaks at conferences and seminars, as well as hosting regional SEM events where he provides participants SEM training and education best practices. Ron also serves on the Board of Directors for SEMPO and is also one of the authors for the SEMPO Institute Fundamentals and Advanced courses.

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