vSEO update 22/11
Within my SEO team I feel quite privilaged to be the one driving the video SEO truck. Online video is in high demand while facing low competition and its demand is predicted to soar sky-high in the near future.
Mediapost.com released a stat saying:
- Online video viewing accounts for 30% of all internet traffic (2010).
- By 2013, this figure is expected to be up to 90%.
If you’re not already optimising for video within your company, you should be. This train is already in motion, and if you leave it too long, that train will generate speed and be long gone with a load of other companies on board such as Old Spice who have already scooped video gold big time. And by ‘optimise’, I’m not just talking metadata. Increasingly, it’s all about engagement. You can’t just whack up a load of video, use all the appropriate metadata and move on to creating more video. You have to spend time engaging; that means commenting, sharing and interacting. Metadata is important, don’t get me wrong, but one is powerless without the other.
Moving on… Youtube changes. 
- Some new changes – you can now change and control the layout of your own channel. That means displaying likes, favourites, panels etc, whichever way you like. The new change has returned mixed responses. From what I’ve seen, lots of people don’t like it and are stuck because they can’t change it back to the old version. Change always ruffles a few feathers initially though, give it some time.
- Positively however, Youtube are now tracking people (presumably through this new layout) who visits your video page FIRST, then when they come to watch video, your other videos will be showing more prominently in the ‘related videos’ section. I’m always harping on about linking to the channel page in video descriptions; this Youtube implementation will argue my case for me.
The Best SEO Infographics Around
These are the chosen infographics that go on our SEO wall of fame at Link Island (a little cluster of desks where the majority of our team work from.) This post will be updated with every fresh and quality infographic that I/we find.
4. How Google killed the longtail
This is a really nice infographic from seobook.com that really touches on lots of areas and segments itself in a clear concise way that’s easy to consume. As is the effect of a quality infographic, it’s informative and it’s likely to stick in your mind. See the full page including comments from users at:
http://www.seobook.com/google-longtail-keywords-infographic
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3. Why Content for SEO
The first is one that has been kicking around for some time and it’s quite a meaty piece. But don’t let that put you off. It’s worth taking the time to chew it over.
Courtesy of SearcEngineLand.com (http://searchengineland.com/infographic-why-content-for-seo-96834)
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2. The Periodic Table of SEO ranking factors
This one is for the scientific, using a kind of periodic table to explain the SEO ranking factors. It emphasises the notion that SEO is not about ticking the boxes and targeting ‘the best ranking factor’. Rather, they work in conjunction with one another, each with their own weight.
Courtesy of SearchOnlineLand.com (http://searchengineland.com/seotable/)
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1. What does it take to get a job at Google?
This may be a slight departure from regular SEO infographics in the sense that it’s not really SEO at all. But I think it’s safe to say we’d all like a job at Google so it should be interesting to us SEO’s none-the-less. Apparently, as an employee – you’re well looked after (once you trial the gauntlet interviews). As a hefty bonus to working at Google, the staff food is exquisite and FREE. They even let you have your dinner there before you leave to go home at the end of the day. Bottom line; they’re a good company to work for, and not likely to go out of business. In fact as far as absolutes go, Google’s business presence should probably rank up there with death and taxes. (Rank pun not intentional)
‘SEO beginnings’ part II
Now that Google have the indecies of the ‘keyword inverted index’ from part 1, Google calculate something called ‘query independant metrics‘, which is simpler than it sounds. Search engines know that pages have attributes beyond those that are important in relation to the keywords that people search for. These attributes are matters of relevance and importance such as how many people link to them, who link to them, what are people saying about them, are the people linking to them reputable and trustworthy? This is what query independant metrics calculate, which brings us to the ‘page rank algorithm‘.
Search engines like Google and Bing each have a complex mathematical algorithm that combines a whole range of ranking factors to perform the highest quality results possible. SEO guys try to appeal to these ranking factors by creating site architecture that’s easy for Google to crawl, stay accessible to users, get links from respectable outside sources and score well with social media. If you place a bunch of good content behind subscription walls, logins or the over-use of javascript, you’ll block Google and you won’t be ranked i.e. Googlebot will call it a day and go home.
It’s important to remember that Google (and Bing etc) are not playing games to try and fool people. They want to give the best search experience for the user and therefore will eliminate spammy and black-hat SEO methods in order to achieve an organic SERP (search engine results page). You simply have to prove that you have quality, useful and valuable information that the user can benefit from. This is why the term ‘content is king’ still orbits the SEO world on loop, whether you’re in e-commerce, journalism or just trying to reach people.
‘SEO beginnings’ part 1
I used to think I had learned all there was to know about SEO in an online module of my journalism degree. I thought that tagging articles and writing search friendly headlines was all there was to it. Wow, was I wrong. In a few years I predict that universities will be offering degree courses of SEO, with web analytics modules thrown in for good measure. Not only is it a vast and expansive subject, but it’s growing in business faster than Beber Fever did with teenage girls. It’s complex – no two ways about it, but it’s not exclusively for tech nerds who still live with mum at 30 years old, play Warcraft and can write HTML and javascript code. Furthermore, SEO is not so much difficult to learn, but it is difficult to execute well.
The first thing to do is give an overview of SEO as I understand it. Masses of detail is useless unless you can see the overall picture first. This may just be my learning style, but I’ve found that others like me need to have a birds-eye view of their subject first. Otherwise it’s like learning how to capitalise on share profits when you don’t understand the stock market.
Search engines like Google and Bing are ultimately ranking pages according to popularity, importance and relevancy. The first question is how do search engines do this and how have Google in particular gotten so good at ranking? It’s fair to say that Google is the mac-daddy of search engines, and it’s no surprise to anyone that they’re dominating with around 75% of users. Before we go further into this, here’s a good illustration of why Google wups the competition in practice.
Google uses googlebot; a cute but busy and diligent little fella that crawls billions of pages of the web. Googlebot starts its crawl with a seed set of websites and will use the links from those sites to lots of other pages in order to find a structure of the internet. From here Googlebot can discover all the pages on the web. Because the web is so interconnected, even the most obscure websites are only a few clicks away from some of the most popular and important websites.
Once all of these pages are crawled, Google build a collection of the keywords using something called a ‘keyword inverted index‘. This is essentially a selection of terms and phrases that appear on, or are relevant to certain pages. So for example, if someone searches for Apple, Google already has an index they built of the pages that are relevant to Apple. Whether that be iPod reviews, iPhone retailers, Mac blogs etc. And Google can make queries against those much more quickly than it can against an index with all the billions of documents on the web.
End of part 1.
NEXT: Query Independent Metrics
‘Basics of video SEO’ part 1
So video search is he-ouge. In fact, video searches account for 28% of all Google enquiries. Google are (no surprises here) smartening up to this kind of demand and are incorporating video search into the algorithm more and more. You may even begin to notice thumbnails of videos appaearing in regular searches EVEN when the word ‘video’ is not part of the search.
We’re actually a microwave kind of society, so video really suits a lot of people. We like everything to be instant and many of us don’t like to read something if it can be given to us in video format – mainly because reading requires more focus and often cases – more time. A lot of people are after quick snappy content, and video is the microwave platform.
2 billion videos a day are being watched by the world just on Youtube. That’s 23,000 videos per second. Yet 24% of all retailers are NOT present on Youtube – the biggest host of video by no small margin. On top of that, 24% of top retailers who ARE present, have limited online prescence, i.e. have an inactive channel or minimal views. These figures indicate that almost a half of the market are untouched and unaffected by Youtube, which is also the world’s second-largest search engine.
This technically makes video an untapped market; competition is low when the demand is high. Not many companies are optimising for video so this is a key time for many businesses to gain some online prescence. From the way figures are climbing, the number of views per day is set to climb, and the demand for video is expected to increase. It’s 0nly going to get bigger, so companies have a need to get on board.
Next post: what to do to take advantage of this untapped market.
My first SEO related post
Stomp stomp I’ve arrived.
Now that I’ve been introduced to SEO and have been told that Google will be my best friend from now on, I can safely say I’m in for the long haul.
I have a copy of “The art of SEO” (Enge/Spencer/Fishkin) in front of me and I have a tonne of bookmarks on my browser loaded with SEO articles – most of which I don’t fully understand yet. But I’m getting there.
I currently work at Phones 4u and am getting a lot of input from the team here. If you are reading this and know of useful resources, please send them my way, or tweet me. It’d be great to connect.
My boss has us bidding farewell in the most nerdy way ever. And I’m about to hit you with it.
Link well!
Dean
