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be available for quite some time and you don’t want someone getting turned off thinking they’re watching something outdated.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.
30 “Must Have” Plugins For Your WordPress Blog
Filed under: Facebook, Google, Marketing Strategies, Plugins, Productivity, seo, Traffic, twitter, Videos, WordPress
There are 14,865 (and counting) plugins available for you to download and use. But how do you know which ones pack the most punch, which ones are updated often and most of all, which ones will be worth your time.
Below are 30 “Must Have” Plugins for your WordPress blog.
Membership & Engagement
Having a blog just isn’t enough. You need a way to get those readers engaged and these plugins will help you do just that.
- WordPress eMember – this neat little plugin let’s you turn your existing WordPress site into a membership site.
- FeedBurner FeedSmith – this plugin will detect all of the ways to access your original WordPress feeds and redirect them to your FeedBurner feed so that you can track every last subscriber.
- Add to Any: Subscribe Button – Helps your readers subscribe to your blog using any feed reader they’d like.
- MailChip Widget - This lets your users sign up to your MailChimp mailing list.
Social Networking
We all need ways to engage people on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and the like. These plugins will help you do just that.
- Simple Twitter Connect – this plugin makes it easy for your site to use Twitter in a very modular way.
- Facebook Comments for WordPress – let’s your visitors comment on posts using their Facebook profile. (I’m sure you’ve seen this widely used across the web). This also supports custom styles, notifications, combined comment counts and recent comments.
- Simple Facebook Connect - this makes it easy to use Facebook Connect on your site.
- Share This – a very useful and popular plugin that let’s your site visitors share a post or a page with others. This also supports email and posting to social bookmarking sites.
- Sociable – automatically add links to your favorite social bookmarking sites on your posts, pages and in your RSS feed.
Monetization
We all would like to have the ability to make money from our blog right? These plugins help you do just that.
- AdSense Now! – Simply puts your AdSense code in up to three spots in your posts and pages. Even those that don’t exist yet!
- WP e-Commerce – this is an application that let’s you use a fully featured shopping cart application.
- Awesome Google AdSense – This plugin will automatically insert Google AdSense ads into your posts, pages and sidebar. No more copying and pasting!
- WordPress Simple PayPal Shopping Cart – This lets you add an “Add to Cart” button on any post or page. You can also display the shopping cart within the sidebar easily. It shows the user what they have in their cart and lets them remove items if they want to.
Media – Videos, Images and Audio
Many people like to have all kinds of content on their sites; not just text but images, videos and even audio files. These plugins will help you do just that.
- NextGen Gallery - A fully integrated Image Gallery plugin for WordPress with a slideshow option.
- FancyBox for WordPress – Integrates FancyBox into your blog and allows you to upload, activate and done. But…you can customize it if you want to.
- All in One Video Pack – Touted as “not just another video embed tool”. Includes all kinds of functionality you may need.
- WordPress Video Plugin – A filter for WordPress that allows for easy embedding of supported sites. (Currently 65 different video sites).
- Degradable HTML5 audio and video – Use this plugin to embed video and audio on your site using shortcodes. It enables HTML5 native playback for those users who have compatible browsers.
Security
If you run a WordPress blog currently, you know that WordPress updates constantly; usually for security measures. That said, sometimes you can’t get to it quick enough to upgrade so these plugins should help you out.
- LoginLockdown – If someone tries to login to your blog and guess your password, this neat little plugin will detect how many times someone has tried from an IP address and locks it down after a certain number of failed attempts. It even logs the IP address and timestamp of when these attempts occured.
- Akismet – This plugin catches all of those spam comments you receive on a constant basis. Now, that said, it used to be 100% free; and it still is for personal, non-business accounts. But if you have a blog that would be classified as a business site, it’ll now cost you $5 a month. A small price to pay for saving time deleting spammy comments.
- WordPress Database Backup – Creates a backup of your core WordPress database tables as well as any other tables of your choice.
Search Engine Optimization
We all need SEO on our sites, whether that be a blog or not. But, WordPress makes it easy to optimize your posts and pages with a few plugins.
- WordPress SEO by Yoast - “The most complete all in one SEO solution for your WordPress blog.” With a huge list of features that are far too numerous to mention here.
- Google XML Sitemaps – Creates an XML Sitemap that’s compliant and supported by Ask.com, Google, Yahoo!, and Bing.
- SEO Smart Links – Automatically links keywords and phrases in your posts and comments with their corresponding posts, pages, categories and tags.
- Google Analytics for WordPress – There’s a complete video introduction about this plugin if you visit the link on the left but essentially it does so much more for you than a simple “plug the analytics code into your blog”. See the site for more information.
Speed
In case you missed it, Google is now taking into account site speed when it looks at a site. No one wants to visit a website and have to wait 15 seconds for it to load. These plugins will help you with this issue.
- W3 Total Cache – Used by some well known names such as MattCutts.com, Mashable, and LockerGnome.com, as well as recommended by HostGator, MediaTemple and more, it improves the user experience by improving your server performance, caching every aspect of your site.
- WP Super Cache – Generates HTML files that are served directly by Apache without processing heavy PHP scripts.
Functionality
Sometimes you just want your blog to do certain things…
- Redirection – Manages 301 redirects, and essentially ties up all those loose ends you may have on your site.
- Exclude Pages – Adds a checkbox, “include this page in menus”, which is checked by default. If unchecked, the page will not appear in any listings of pages.
- WP Contact Form – A drop in form for users to contact you. Can be placed on any page or post.
This information was originally posted at ineedhits but I’ve expanded the explanations a little bit to give you a better overview.
Are there any other plugins that you use and recommend? What are they?
How to Create a PDF AND Keep the Links In-Tact (for free)
I created this short video for the “How To” videos section of KristineWirth.com but thought you’d appreciate it here too.
One of the biggest issues I’ve had with creating PDF files personally is not getting the links to remain in-tact after I publish a file to PDF format. I don’t want to spend the hundreds of dollars it takes for “professional” software because I only wanted to accomplish two things:
- Make the PDF Password protected AND
- Maintain the links both in the table of contents AND within the document itself
It took some research but after spending some time perusing resources online, I discovered that I already had the ability to do this and I could do it for free!
Watch how I did it:
