Watch Those Ads on Your Site
Filed under: Google, Marketing, Ranking, Traffic
Recently Google’s Matt Cutts mentioned at PubCon that Google will be taking a long, hard look at websites that have lots of ads above the fold, or in other words, sites that require you to scroll down past the ads in order to get to the content.
I don’t think that all of the details have been released on this as of yet (and don’t know that they will be), but Matt made it clear that if a site has an abundance of ads above the fold, it could be construed as spam.
That being said, I’d take a look at your sites and make sure that you don’t have AdSense ads taking up most of the space at the top of your content; if anything just to be safe. I know that this is a super-short post but there’s really not a whole lot more information about this (yet). I’m sure that as this algorithm change starts to take effect, that there will be more information on it.
Facebook Advertising 101
Facebook is actively used by millions of people all over the world with many of these people logging in on a daily basis. As a matter of fact, their traffic alone is very close to the amount of traffic that Google gets on a daily basis and it’s growing.
The biggest difference between Facebook and Google however, is that Facebook wants you to stick around for awhile, engage with others, play games, etc. Whereas Google’s main goal is to get you off of Google.com as quickly as possible. Now this might sound a little counter-intuitive but Google’s main goal is to deliver to you relevant search results. If they do, you’ll click off of Google.com and head off to a website that hopefully had your answer.
So while both Google and Facebook get their fair share of traffic, they have different overall goals.
One of the best ways to get traffic is to advertise on Facebook. And that’s what we’ll touch on here.
When it comes to advertising, I’d have to give the upper-hand to Facebook. Not only are they more affordable, but they keep statistics on users that range everywhere from their age, their relationship status, what groups they belong to, what their interests are, where they’re located, and more.
As an example, let’s say that you sold hair bows for little girls and you decided to advertise on Facebook. Using all of this data that Facebook has on their users, you can specifically target users based on all of this data. Why this is so significant for you as an advertiser, is because you’re not just basing your advertising on keywords much like Google’s program does, but rather you can really nail-down who you want to see your ad.
However, the biggest downfall with Facebook advertising is this. Let’s say that you decided to show your ad to Moms who have daughters; makes sense right? Even if those Mom’s see your ad and click on it, they’re likely going to see the ad again quite often as long as you have it running. Someone searching on Google however, likely is seeking out a very specific keyword such as “hair bows for girls” and the likelihood of them seeing your ad on more than one occasion is rare.
So you want to handle Facebook advertising a little differently.
Instead of just running a generic ad consider using that ad to promote products that someone will want to use on a continuous basis – such as offering a wide array of different colors, sizes, etc., in other words, products that will be wanted by your audience over and over again.
You can also run specials that are only good for a certain period of time.
The key with Facebook advertising is to create a wide variety of advertisements so that the user is always engaged with your product and so they don’t see the same ad over and over again.
Lastly, you can use Facebook as a way to capture leads and add them to your auto-responder program. This is a big plus for many Facebook advertisers simply because Google has put a kabosh on this kind of advertising. If you tried to place an ad on Google that led to a lead-capture page, the odds are your ad would get disapproved before anyone could even see it.
In a later post, I’ll create a walk-through that will take you through how to set up a Facebook advertising campaign but for now, if you were considering marketing your product, website or even your Facebook page on Facebook, I highly recommend it.
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How to SEO Your Videos
Filed under: Internet Marketing, Marketing, Marketing Strategies, Traffic, Videos
It probably comes to no surprise to you that it’s important to use online video as a way to get your message across; whatever that message might be. Whether you’re marketing a product, want to create brand awareness, want to showcase what kinds of services your business offers, you need video.
Not using video as part of your overall marketing strategy means you are missing out on a whole lot of traffic.
Today, it’s very easy to create your own videos, whether you’re using a screen capture program like Camtasia Studio, you’re recording it from your smart-phone or just using the built-in webcam on your laptop. Creating the video is easy. What to do with it once your done is a whole other matter…
Here we’ll take a look at a few fundamentals you can use when creating your video and then we’ll talk about the pros and cons of hosting it on your own site versus posting it on video-sharing sites.
Video Creation Tips
- When you’re creating your video or writing your script, avoid talking about specific dates or times. Your video will likely be available for quite some time and you don’t want someone getting turned off thinking they’re watching something outdated.
- Also, don’t forget to add your website address, your logo, or any other important piece of information to your video as to how people can contact you. Some folks place their URL at the bottom of the video and leave it there for the duration of the video. TIP: Because ads typically appear at the bottom of a video while you’re viewing it on YouTube for example, the ad will cover up your website address so try placing it in a spot that will always be visible to the viewer.
- Your voice and any audio you have on the video should be very clear. At one point in time Google was testing something called “Google Audio Indexing” or GAudi. This was located in Google labs which is being phased out so I’m not certain where this product sits right now. However, they are using automatic captioning which attempts to ascertain what is being said in the video and then translates that into captions. The bottom line is, you’d be better off making sure any verbal content in the video is clear enough so that you can take advantage of this service. It wouldn’t hurt to also mention a few keywords here and there as well.
- At the end of the video be absolutely sure that you tell the viewer what you want them to do next. Sign up for your newsletter? Visit your website? Call you?
- When you save your video, give it a keyword-rich name. Video54879.mp4 doesn’t tell Google anything about the contents of that video. Finding-Cheap-Books.mp4 however, does.
Once you’ve covered these bases, what do you do now? One of the first questions to consider is “Should I host the video myself on my own site?” or “Should I post this video to YouTube?”
Hosting Your Own Videos
By far the biggest factor is how much bandwidth you have with your hosting account. Some hosting accounts limit how much bandwidth you can use each month and if you happen to go over that amount, you’ll get charged extra.
There are some companies like HostGator for example who don’t limit your bandwidth at all.
But if you’re not willing to completely change hosting companies, you might want to consider using a service such as Amazon’s S3 service. They offer a very cheap alternative which currently charges $.12 cents per gigabyte up to 10 terabytes per month. It’s not unusual to get a bill for say, $4.00. A great alternative if you are looking for way to personally host videos but don’t want to pay your hosting companies overage costs.
If you decide to host your own video (see the tip below about using both your own site and YouTube to utilize the most traffic possible), you’ll want to also make use of these SEO Tips:
Posting Your Video
When you post your video at sites like YouTube, MetaCafe, etc., you get the added benefit of being able to share your videos easily not to mention that it gets in front of more people than it would otherwise have the opportunity to do.
The biggest downsides to posting on a video sharing site as opposed to your own though is that the viewer will be exposed to advertising within your video, and you’re often limited as to how long your video can be.
It’s not uncommon however, for people to use both of these. For instance, posting a short video on a video sharing site which is considered the “teaser” video and then encouraging them to visit your own website where they can watch the rest.
What’s Next? Video Sitemaps
Videos (at least at the time of this writing) have to rely on metadata in order to get it listed properly in the search results. One great way to make sure this happens is to use an XML Video Sitemap. See the Google Help file on creating a Video Sitemap.
There’s also a way to combine all of your sitemaps such as html, mobile, video, etc. See this Google post for details.
Additionally…
If you decide to post to a video-sharing site, don’t forget to write a description for your video that makes use of the keywords you’re trying to target for that video.
Also, don’t forget to add your URL as close to the beginning of the description as possible and be absolutely certain that you include the “http://” portion, otherwise your link will not work.
