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.
Google Analytics – Removing Your Own IP Address
Using Google Analytics on your website gives you lots of great information about your site visitors and keywords along with a host of other useful information. But sometimes that data that you get can be a bit skewed if you haven’t told Analytics to NOT count your own IP address.
Chances are, you visit your own site quite a bit and these visits are being counted in your overall data.
So how do you tell Analytics to stop tracking your own visits?
It’s actually very simple…here’s how:
- First you need to find out what your own IP address is. To do this visit http://www.whatismyip.com/. When you get there you’ll see in very large letters at the top of the page “Your IP Address Is:” and this will be followed by a series of numbers such as 012.345.678.910. Copy your IP address down and then head to Google Analytics.
- Once you’re logged into your Analytics account you’ll see the website(s) you’re tracking. Next to each site on the far right-hand side of the page is an “Edit” link. Click this link next to the site you want to modify.
- The next screen will have a section entitled “Filters” – once you find this look for an “Add Filter” link on the upper right hand side of this section and click that link.
- Now you’re going to create a new filter. Choose the radio button that says “Add new Filter for Profile” if it’s not already selected.
- Next, give the filter a name that’s easy for you to identify what the filter is for such as “My IP Address”.
- Next, choose the “Predefined filter” button if it’s not selected already.
- You’ll see various drop down boxes. In the first box choose “Exclude”. In the middle box choose “traffic from the IP addresses” and in the third box choose “that are equal to”. Finally, enter your IP address that you just copied into the boxes.
- Click “Save changes”.
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.
