Internet Marketing Optimization | SEO Expert

5 Killer Strategies to Boost Your Company’s Product using YouTube

Whether you run a small business from your home or work for a large corporation, you can use YouTube to boost your company. As you probably know, YouTube is a No.1 video sharing community where anyone including you and your business can upload videos for others to view. The trick is to determine the right kind of video to upload, and then finding a way to profit from YouTube viewership.

Using YouTube as a Video Host

Do you already have videos in your business? If your answer is yes, you can easily upload those videos to YouTube, for anyone to view. (Whether anyone wants to view your videos is another story, however, which we’re going to cover shortly.) Aside from making your videos public, there’s one more good reason to upload your videos to YouTube; when YouTube hosts your video, you don’t have to.

That’s right; YouTube is, at its most basic, a giant video hosting website. Instead of taking up valuable storage space on your own web server, you can allow YouTube host your video instead. You will display the video on your own website, of course, but you do it by embedding code for the video in your site’s underlying HTML. The code points to the video on the YouTube site; YouTube then serves the video from its website to appear on your webpage.

Not only you save on storage costs, you also don’t have to pay for all the bandwidth used when visitors watch your videos and YouTube offers unlimited bandwidth. Yes, you still have a slight bandwidth usage when someone views the text of your webpage, but the bandwidth used to deliver the video comes straight from YouTube.

If you run a small business with limits on storage and bandwidth, letting YouTube host your videos can be a real cost saver. And if your video happens to become popular or even viral, you don’t risk having your servers overload and shutdown; YouTube’s servers will handle the load as I said earlier YouTube offers unlimited bandwidth.

Creating an Online Video Presence

What types of videos can your business make for YouTube? It depends on the type of your business and on the way you want to use the Web.

First, look at any existing videos you might have made for use in your business. Perhaps you’ve taped a company meeting, seminar or webinar, or you have a PowerPoint presentation that’s been converted to video. Or maybe you’re a realtor who has recorded video house tours or a motivational speaker who has a speech or two recorded on tape. Any of those videos could make a good beginning point for moving your business to YouTube.

Take the example of realtor. Today, most realtors take digital photographs of the houses they list, and then potential buyers view those photos on their website. But there’s nothing stopping you from using a camcorder to produce a video tour of the house, editing that tour into a short video, and then publishing that video on YouTube. You can then embed the YouTube video on your own website, so that potential buyers can view the video. It’s a great improvement to a realtor’s selling services, and it doesn’t cost you a cent (beyond the cost of shooting the video, of course).

Here’s one more example for you. If your business is a leader in its category, or if you yourself are an industry specialist, you can establish and exploit that expertise via a series of YouTube videos. All it takes is a video camera or webcam pointed at you behind a desk; you then spend three or four minutes talking about a peculiar topic or issue of interest. Think of it as a professional video blog; if you truly know what you’re talking about, it will help to establish your professional credentials and polish your company’s image.

For that matter, there are a lot of different types of videos that can help enhance your company’s image. There may be value, for example, in placing a video online of your company’s most recent sales conference or at least the part that introduces forthcoming new products. Or maybe your company has hosted a seminar or conference that is of interest to others outside your company. These videos can be edited for duration and uploaded to YouTube, where any interested party can view them.

That said; there is one type of video that you don’t want to upload. YouTube is not the place to recycle your company’s commercials. Users will not go out of their way to view something online that they try to avoid in the real world. Unless you have a really clever, Super bowl worthy commercial that people want to view again and again, keep your ads to yourself and don’t upload them to YouTube.

Promoting Products and Services via YouTube

So far, I’ve talked about videos that only broadly boost your company, in terms of enhancing your company’s image. You can also use YouTube more directly to boost your company’s products and services that is, to drive potential customers to your website where they can buy what you sell. To do this, you need to make and upload videos that function as online infomercials, subtly boosting your company’s products and services.

Let’s say that you offer gift baskets for sale. You create a short video for YouTube about how to make gift baskets something that would be of interest to anyone in the market for them. You prominently display your web page address and phone number within the video, and in the descriptive text that accompanies the video on the YouTube site. Because the video has some informational content (the how-to information), it attracts viewers, and a certain percentage of these will follow through to purchase the gift baskets you have for sale.

Or maybe you’re a business consultant and you want to promote your consulting services. To demonstrate what you have to offer potential clients, you create and upload some sort of short video a motivational lecture, perhaps, or a slideshow about specific business practices, or something similar. You use the video to establish your expert status and then display your email address or web page URL to solicit business for your consulting services.

Or maybe you have a full-length DVD for sale. You excerpt a portion of DVD and upload it to YouTube, with graphics before and after (and maybe even during) the video detailing how the full-length DVD can be ordered.

Likewise if you’re a musician with CDs to sell, an author with books to sell, an artist with paintings or other artwork to sell, or a crafts maker with various crafts and such to sell. The musician might create a music video to promote his CDs; the author might read an excerpt from her book; the artist might produce a photo slideshow of his work; and the crafts maker might upload a short video walk-through of pieces she has for sale. Make sure you include details for how the additional product can be ordered, and let your placement on YouTube do the promotion for you.

As an example, Charles Smith Pottery offers a series of instructional videos on YouTube that demonstrate how to use a pottery wheel. Interested viewers can then access the accompanying website (detailed both in the video and in the video’s description) to learn more and to see what products the company has for sale.

Another example is t he San Francisco Electric Tour Company, which offers Segway tours of the San Francisco Bay Area. The company created an entertaining demo video about the Segway and their tours and then uploaded the video to YouTube. Interested people can view the video and then contact the firm to schedule a tour. It’s quite synergistic.

Then there’s John Pullum, a hypnotist and mind reader who provides corporate entertainment and motivational speeches. He’s uploaded videos of several of his appearances to YouTube; they’re both entertaining and informational regarding the services that he has to offer. Any viewer who likes what they see can then go to his website to learn more or to arrange an engagement.

The key is to create a video that people actually want to watch. That means something informative, useful, or entertaining. It can’t be a straight commercial, because people don’t like to watch commercials. It has to provide value to the viewer.

Once you get the viewer hooked, you lead him back to your website where your goods or services are for sale. It’s a two-step process watch the video, then go to the website to learn more or buy something. If your video is interesting enough, viewers will make the trip to your website to close the deal.

Shooting for YouTube: Proper Production Values

When you’re producing a video for YouTube, keep in mind that the video will be viewed in a small (320 x 240 pixel) window on the viewer’s computer monitor. It won’t be viewed on a high-definition widescreen TV; it won’t even be viewed on the full computer screen. No, your video has to be compelling when viewed in that small YouTube video window.

What this means is that you don’t need to spend a lot of money on sophisticated video values. Skip the HDTV recording, skip the widescreen aspect ratio, may be even skip the ultra-expensive lights and makeup. Make your video good enough to be viewed at a 320 x 240 size, and don’t waste your money on production values that won’t be visible to the viewer.

In addition, keep that size in mind when deciding what to shoot. Don’t bother with crowd scenes; all those people will be too tiny to see in the small video window. Instead, compose an image that has maximum impact in the small window. What works best, more often than not, is a large subject against a simple background. That might be nothing more than the speaker full-frame against a light background; it’s a big image with good contrast, which is what you want.

You should, however, spend a few bucks for onscreen graphics. You want a title for your video, appropriate subtitles throughout, and your company’s phone number and website URL. These graphics need to look professional, and be large enough to read in the YouTube video window.

You can shoot a video for YouTube using professional video equipment, a consumer-level video camcorder (shooting in digital video format, of course), or even a computer webcam. Many video blogs are shot with simple webcams, just a person in front of the camera, talking about the subject at hand. You’ll probably want to transfer the video to a computer for editing, of course; any consumer-level video editing program, such as Microsoft’s Windows Movie Maker or Apple’s iMovie, should do the trick.

As to length, YouTube lets you upload videos up to 10 minutes long. If you have a longer video say, a half-hour seminar on tape you can simply edit it into several shorter segments. In fact, shorter segments are generally better; I recommend keeping your videos to three minutes or less. Anything longer and you’ll start to bore people and lose viewers. Even if you have a 10-minute video, you might want to edit it into three or four 2- or 3-minute segments. YouTube viewers have a short attention span, and you need to compensate for this.

Uploading Your Videos to YouTube

The hardest part about uploading a video to YouTube is creating and editing the video. The uploading process itself is so simple a CEO can do it.

First, however, you have to make sure that your video file meets YouTube’s requirements, which are as follows:

• MPEG-4 format video with either the DivX or XviD codecs
• MP3 format audio
• 320[ts]240 resolution
• Frame rate of 30 frames per second (FPS)
• Length of 10 minutes or less
• File size of 100MB or less

If you shot your video with a digital camcorder or computer webcam, it’s probably in the right format to begin with, so there’s no conversion necessary. Your only concern is to stay within the length and file size limits.

To upload the video, click the Upload Videos link at the top right-hand corner of any YouTube page. This displays the Video Upload page; you now have a little paperwork to do.

First, enter a title for your video. Make sure it’s descriptive without being overly long. Next, enter a description for the video; this can and should be longer and more complete. (And don’t forget to include your phone number and website address in the description.)

Then enter one or more tags for the video, separating each tag by a space. Tags are keywords people use when searching; use as many tags as necessary to capture all possible search words and attract as many potential viewers as possible.

Now pull down the Video Category list and select a category for the video. Click the Upload a Video button when you’re ready to proceed.

Step two of the video upload process is where you specify the file you want to upload. Click the Browse button to open the Select File to Upload dialog box; navigate to and select the file you want and then click Open. This loads the filename into the File box on the Video Upload page.

With all of that done, the final step is to click the Upload Video button. YouTube finds the video on your hard disk and starts uploading it; the progress is shown on the Video Upload page. Once uploaded, take note of the video’s URL (to link to from your site and use in promotional material) and the embed code (to embed the video in your own website). Your video is now ready for viewing!

Making the Most of Meta Description Tags

Back to basics time this Friday, and this time, it’s all about the only meta tag that still has relevance; the meta description tag. Meta descriptions have three primary uses:

1. To describe the content of the page accurately and succinctly
2. To serve as a short, text “advertisement” to click on your results in the search results
3. To display targeted keywords, not for ranking purposes, but to indicate the content to searchers

Great meta descriptions, just like great ads, can be tough to write, but for keyword-targeted pages, particularly in competitive search results, they’re a critical part of driving traffic from the engines through to your pages. Their importance is much greater for search terms where the intent of the searcher is unclear or different searchers might have different motivations.

There’s a few good rules to follow when writing meta descriptions that take advantage of their use in pulling in search traffic:

1. Always describe your content honestly – if it’s not as “sexy” as you’d like, spice up your content, don’t bait and switch on searchers or they’ll have a poor brand association.
2. Character limits – currently Google displays up to 160 characters, Yahoo! up to 165 and MSN up to 200+ (they’ll go to three vertical lines in some cases). Stick with the smallest – Google – and keep those descriptions at 160 characters (including spaces) or less.
3. Write with as much sizzle as you can while staying descriptive – the perfect meta description is like the perfect ad – compelling and informative.
4. Just like an ad, you can test meta description performance in the search results, but it takes careful attention. You’ll need to buy the keyword through PPC so you know how many impressions it received over a given timeframe and can track your CTR.
5. Unlike an ad, the motivation for natural search click is frequently very different than that of users clicking on the paid results. Don’t assume that a successful PPC ad will transition into a good meta description (or the reverse).
6. It’s extremely important to have your keywords in the meta tag – the bolding done by the engines can make a big difference in visibility and CTR.
7. You shouldn’t always write a meta description. Although conventional logic would hold that it’s universally wiser to write a good meta description yourself, rather than let the engines scrape your page, this isn’t the case. I use the general rule that if the page is targeting 1-3 heavily-searched terms/phrases, go with a meta description that hits those users performing that search. However, if you’re targeting longer tail traffic, for example with hundreds of articles or blog entries or even a huge product catalog, it can sometimes be wiser to let the engines themselves extract the relevant text. The reason is simple – when engines pull, they always display the keywords (and surrounding phrases) that the user searched for. If you force a meta description, you can detract from the relevance the engines make naturally. In some cases, they’ll overrule your meta description anyway, but it’s not always wise to rely on that.

So, we’ve now completed the triumvirate of on-page basics with title tags, meta descriptions and URLs. If you’ve got some valuable meta description writing techniques, please do share.

11 Best Practices for URLs

I could have sworn that someone has already a great post or forum thread on this topic, but I can’t seem to find it (no matter how advanced my operators). I’m sure Mr. Malicoat has it in his bookmarks, but since blog posts are one of my personal systems for public bookmarking, here goes.

Eleven Guidelines to Successful URLs

1. Describe Your Content
   An obvious URL is a great URL. If a user can look at the Address bar (or a pasted link) and make an accurate guess about the content of the page before ever reaching it, you’ve done your job. These URLs get pasted, shared, emailed, written down, and yes, even recognized by the engines.
2. Keep it Short
   Remember always; brevity is a virtue. The shorter the URL, the easier to copy & paste, read over the phone, write on a business card, or use in a hundred other unorthodox fashions, all of which spell better usability & increased branding.
3. Static is the Way & the Light
   Not to bring religion into this, but I can tell you with certainty that some of the engines absolutely DO treat static URLs differently than dynamic ones. And no human likes a URL where the big players are “?,” “&,” and “=.”
4. Descriptives are Better than Numbers
   If you’re thinking of using 114/cat223/, go with /brand/adidas/ instead. Even if the descriptive isn’t a keyword or particularly informative to an uninitiated user, it’s far better to use words when possible. If nothing else, your team members will thank you for making it that much easier to ID problems in development and testing.
5. Keywords Never Hurt
   If you know that you’re going to be targeting a lot of competitive keyword phrases on your website for search traffic, you’ll want every advantage you can get. Keywords are certainly one element of that strategy, so take the list from marketing, map it to the proper pages, and get to work. For dynamically created pages through a CMS, create the option of including keywords in the URL.
6. Subdomains Aren’t the Answer
   First off, never use multiple subdomains (e.g., siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com) – it’s unnecessarily complex and lengthy. Secondly, consider that subdomains have the potential to be treated separately from the primary domain when it comes to passing link and trust value. In most cases where just a few subdomains are used and there’s good interlinking, it won’t hurt, but I wouldn’t take the chance. To me, the benefits derived from reputation management (by flooding the SERPs with your subdomains) are minimal compared to the potential loss of link/trust juice. I also think that subdomain takeovers of SERPs is not something the search engines see as beneficial to their users and may shut down at any point. Luckily, if you’re doing it now, you can always 301 to the main domain.
7. Fewer Folders
   A URL should contain no unnecessary folders (or words or characters for that matter), for the same reason that a man’s pants should contain no unnecessary pleats. The extra fabric is useless and will reduce his likelihood of impressing potential mates.
8. Hyphens Separate Best
   When creating URLs with multiple words in the format of a phrase, hyphens are best to separate the terms (e.g. /brands/dolce-and-gabbana/), followed (in order) by, underscores (_), pluses (+) and nothing.
9. Stick with Conventions
   If your site uses a single format throughout, don’t consider making one section unique. Stick to your URL guidelines once established, so users (and future developers) will have a clear idea of how content is organized into folders and pages. This can apply globally as well for sites that share platforms, brands, etc. Re-inventing the wheel in situations where reliance on convention makes everyone’s tasks easier is folly.
10. Don’t be Case Sensitive
    Since URLs can accept both uppercase and lowercase characters, don’t ever, ever allow any uppercase letters in your structure. If you have them now, 301 them to all-lowercase versions to help avoid confusion. If you have a lot of type-in traffic, you might even consider a 301 rule that sends any incorrect capitalization permutation to its rightful home.
11. Don’t Append Extraneous Data
    There’s no point to having a URL exist in which removing characters generates the same content. You can be virtually assured that people on the web will figure it out, link to you in different fashions, confuse themselves, their readers and the search engines (with duplicate content issues), and then complain about it.

Example Time
The following are some grievously heinous violators of the guidelines above:

• http://www.target.com/gp/detail.html/602-9912342-3046240?_encoding=UTF8&frombrowse=1&asin=B000FN0KWA

Target (who’s powered by Amazon) doesn’t describe their content, use keywords, or keep it short. That and the horrifyingly useless data that can be removed from the URL without changing the content make this URL downright ugly.

• http://etsy.com/view_item.php?listing_id=477443&pic_id=2

Despite being one of my favorite sites, Etsy’s URLs provide no descriptive information, use multiple dynamic parameters and separate breaks with underscores.

• http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=98115&ie=UTF8&z=12&om=1&iwloc=A

Google should be ashamed – their guidelines for URLs practically set the town for the recommendations, but their maps feature is almost unusable due to inefficient, bloated URLs (when they must know that millions want to copy those URLs into emails)

These few below are doing a considerably better job, but could still go the extra mile:

• http://men.style.com/news/gadgets/092006

It’s almost there, and one could almost argue that the subdomain use here is justified for branding purposes. It is too bad they gave us so much data, but then cut out keywords and descriptives right at the end

• http://www.nasa.gov/home/index.html?skipIntro=1

Nasa has uselessly appended dynamic parameters onto the page, and added /home/index.html for no logical reason

• http://www.newyorkmetro.com/fashion/fashionshows/2007/spring/ main/newyork/womenrunway/marcjacobs/

They’re trying to be descriptive, which is great, but not separating words and going 7 folders deep is really pushing it.

These last examples have done nearly everything right:

• http://www.wahidqazi.com/seo-help/

Brilliant – it’s short, descriptive, static and obvious.

• http://blog.wahidqazi.com/11-best-practices-for-urls/

Despite the subdomain, everything else is near perfect.

• http://www.whitehouse.gov/history/presidents/jk35.html

I’m letting the White House off the hook for not using “john-kennedy” as the page title, because they’ve wisely also provided his number (the US’ 35th President).

URLs seem like one of the most simplistic parts of SEO, but I find myself returning to this issue with nearly every client. Hopefully these guidelines can help a few folks make use of best practices before it becomes an issue down the road.

Organic Vs PPC! Who wins?

Interesting comparisons between Organic and PPC listings, everybody wants to know which is of more worth and value, I would say that both have different preposition and benefits. Here is list of elements between both organic and PPC with their pros and corns.

Organic Listings

1. Long Lasting Effect
2. Slow Results
3. Low Cost
4. Less Control Over Ranking
5. More Clicks Than PPC
6. No Management
7. No Monitoring
8. Assumption
9. Gigantic Exposure
10. More Text Space
11. Uncontrolled Title And Description

PPC Listings

1. Effect Depends On Budget
2. Quick Results
3. Expensive
4. Complete Control Over Ranking
5. Less Clicks Than Organic
6. Complete Management
7. Complete Campaign Monitoring
8. Authentic
9. Limited Exposure
10. Less Text Limitation
11. Controlled Title And Description

I’m sure, this comparison will help you take better decision and best use of your hard earned money, both these marketing are very effective in different scenarios, if you have big budget you must go for PPC first and also keep organic as secondary marketing for long term. If you have small budget then organic would be an excellent choice with some paid listings in directories and industry related portals.

About The Author

Wahid Qazi is a Researcher, SEO, Trainer, Speaker and Author, specializes in google optimization and promotion.

How Well Your Website Can Communicate with Search Engines?

Search engines don’t talk with websites directly, they use bots to communicate with websites, their bots come to websites and start reading the websites, whatever they read at websites they go back to search engines carrying the messages and store those messages in search engine’s database.

Search Engines are NOT Human Beings!

Search engines view websites with different prospects. They don’t have eyes to analyze beautiful colors and animations, don’t have ears to listen music and don’t have feelings to fall in love with your catchy slogans. Apart of all these disabilities they can evaluate your website better than a human being.

When you develop or going to get your website developed, what things you should keep in mind? Being website Owner you might think of website design and content, being Webmaster you might think of easy navigation and flexibility of website. You might be missing one very important aspects of search engine positioning, and that is how search engine is viewing your website?

What Things Search Engines Like at Your Website?

Good communication can increase the performance, it applies the same to search engines, if your website can communicate well enough to create good impression to search engines, your website will be facilitating with high rankings then, here is a list of elements search engines like.

• Validated and Optimize Code
• Rich Content
• Unique URL of Each Webpage
• Plain URLs
• Proper Internal Linking
• Healthy Incoming Links
• Text Based Navigation
• Neat Table Structure
• Good Directory and File Structure
• Proper Headings, Subheadings, Captions
• Title, Meta Tags and Alt Tags
• Robots.txt

What Things Search Engines Dislike at Your Website?

Take care of the elements which can hurt your view to search engines, thought each search engine has its own criteria of viewing websites but all major search engines dislike these mentioned elements.

• Broken Links
• Invalid Code
• JavaScript
• Orphan Links, Images and Files
• Under-construction Page/es
• Pop ups
• Redirectors
• IP Tracking
• Dynamically Generated Pages
• Frames
• Same Background and Font Colors
• Multi Nested Table Structure

Search engine bots crawl website with different time frame period, it depends upon how frequently your website updates? Each search engine has its own time frequency to crawl websites, now you know what things do matter to search engines, take care of them so that your website can delivery its message well enough to get top rankings.

Best of luck

About The Author

Wahid Qazi is a Researcher, SEO, Trainer, Speaker and Author, specializes in google optimization and promotion.

Manual Vs Automated Submission! Which one is the best

We all know how important link popularity is for better rankings in top search engine like google, yahoo and msn! In this article you’ll come to know the linking types and brief comparisons of manual submission and automated submissions.

Comparisons of Automated and Manual Submissions:

After looking at the comparisons, you can easily know why manual submissions are considered to be good and recommended by professional SEOs. Don’t look at the shortcomings and a little ease in automated submission, these shortcomings and little comfort can be a nightmare. Submissions are a very important part of link building campaigns, and if your submissions are made correctly they can play huge rule in link building. Try to submit manually so that you can get the maximum benefits out of it.

More links VS More Valuable Links?

Effective manual submissions can be very useful increasing link value, automated submission can create only more incoming links but effective manual submissions can give those links more value.

A professional submitter should always take care of few things, which can give his/her submissions more value.

Take Care of These Elements When Submitting…

1. Should know the type of the link, going to be visible after submission
2. Should know the limits of title and description
3. Should create multiple titles and descriptions according to limits
4. Should check and re-check those submitted links periodically
5. Always keep passwords and ids save for future updates