Posts

10 Ways to Get More Video Views

/0 Comments/in /by

YouTube is the worlds second largest search engine and Google owns YouTube; so ignore video in your online marketing mix at your own peril. Google reports an 80 percent click rate on videos that appear in the search results. Video is here to stay so get into the game by adhering to these 10 tips.[wcm_restrict]

  1. Configure Your YouTube Channel for Optimal SEO – The 2nd biggest search engine on the internet deserves special attention when it comes to SEO. Use your keywords in your title, description and tags.
  2. Syndicate Each of Your Videos – Don’t just put the video on your site and on YouTube, get it on as many video platforms as possible – such as Revver, Tube Mogul and Daily Motion.
  3. Use Video to Educate – There is a concept in Internet Marketing called ‘extending the free line’ – if you want more views then stop thinking sell and start thinking ‘educate’.
  4. Keep It Brief – Unless your video is objectively fascinating, viewers are increasingly likely to tune out if you don’t respect their time – shoot for 5 to 10 mins per video.
  5. Call to Action – Think of each video as it’s own marketing / pr / advertising campaign. What do you want your viewer to do? Are you asking them to do it?
  6. People Like People – Every time we look at a picture with people in it, we pay far more attention. Of course it depends on your subject matter, but try to include humans, don’t overkill it, no one wants to watch a talking head for 5 minutes – just consider in the edit ‘did I include enough human in my video?’
  7. Story Tell – In your 5 to 10 minute video – try to tell a story by hitting these marks. 1. Why your doing what your doing? 2. How your doing what your doing? 3. What your doing with what your doing? 4. What’s been happening because of what you’ve been doing? 5. What you can do for them?
  8. Include Your Video in a PRWeb Press Release – spend the extra cash and embed a video in a press release, if a media outlet is going to run the printed word, many of them will also carry the video.
  9. Keep an Eye on Trends – By watching Google trends and setting your Google Alerts for specific topics, you can be first to market with a video that satisfies a real and current demand.
  10. Do It Right – Whilst there is merit in ‘just doing it’ – if your going to take video seriously and make it part of your ongoing marketing mix, either get good at it by becoming a student of online video – or – hire someone who does it for a living.

[/wcm_restrict][wcm_nonmember]

Hi there! This article is available for free. Login or register as a StrategyDriven Personal Business Advisor Self-Guided Client by:

[reveal_quick_checkout id=”25489″ checkout_text=”Subscribing to the Self Guided Program – It’s Free!”]
 
[/wcm_nonmember]

About the Authors

Jason Hennessey is an internationally-known Search Engine Optimization (SEO) expert. Over the past seven years, Jason has been a vigorous student/practitioner of search marketing – dissecting, testing, debunking, and reverse engineering the major search algorithms.

As the director of SEO at Everspark, Hennessey oversees search marketing campaigns for high profile celebrities, lawyers, politicians and Fortune 500 companies. Within the industry he is known as ‘The Secret Weapon‘ people call on when they want to rank for extremely competitive terms in short periods of time. Jason played an instrumental role in turning Everspark Interactive into a $1.2 million agency in only three months.

Chris Watson is a 20-year marketing veteran, with a wealth of knowledge and experience in the magazine publishing industry. Over the span of his career, Chris has won numerous industry awards for his work with the InfoLink stable of publications in Australia.

In January 2010, he partnered with three colleagues to create a full-service SEO agency called Everspark Interactive. With Chris’s extensive background and creative vision, he has helped grow Everspark Interactive into a $1.2 million company in just three months; making it one of Atlanta’s fastest growing new companies.

10 Ways for Getting Better Links

/0 Comments/in /by

‘Links’ are the currency of the internet and ranking on Google has much to do with how many inbound (one way) links a site has coming into it. Essentially, it’s an election of sorts and not all endorsements (links) are equal. This article covers proven techniques as to how to obtain strong, quality links of various values, weights and strength.[wcm_restrict]

  1. Install a WordPress Blog – WordPress is the blogging platform of choice for most SEO’s – once installed on your site – make sure you have the All-In-One SEO Pack + SEO Slug plug ins installed. Then, when you write a blog post, use your keyword in the Title + create an anchor text link.
  2. Become a Guest Blogger – Bloggers in your industry want new content from industry experts – reach out to them and offer to lend a hand (and include your keyword link in your signature).
  3. Article Syndication – Write as many articles as you can, try to become a subject matter expert – then take those articles and place them on Ezine Articles, Articles Base, or Article Alley.
  4. 3rd Party Blog Posts – Go to Google and type in “Your Keyword + Blog” – spend some time going through the first 3 or 4 pages – choose blogs you’d like to comment on and do so – again, in your signature, place your keyword link.
  5. Set Google Alerts – Using your Gmail account, find Google Alerts – set an alert for every time someone writes a blog or a forum post for your keyword – then go leave comments.
  6. Have Great Content – There’s a novel concept – actually have content people want to link to naturally. This is the very best way to link build so spend some time looking at Google Trends and find out exactly what the market is looking for and serve it up.
  7. Video – It’s one thing to have a video on your site – it’s quite another to syndicate that video content. Every time you place a video on another site – (in most cases) you get a link back to your site.
  8. .Edu Links – These are some of the most powerful links you can get – one way to get .edu links is to find .edu forums and engage in the comments. It stands to reason these forums are pretty heavily monitored, and rightly so – so make sure you’re really there to participate (Tip: participate in your college / university alumni forum).
  9. Bookmark the Pages of Your Website – There are a number of sites that make book marking easy, for instance SocialMarker.com.
  10. Directory Listings – The search engines pay attention to where your site is listed. Some of the best directories you can list in (for SEO purposes) are Yahoo Director, BOTW.com, Business.com, and DMOZ. Also, look for strong directories that are specific to your industry or at least, subsections of directories that address your industry.

[/wcm_restrict][wcm_nonmember]

Hi there! This article is available for free. Login or register as a StrategyDriven Personal Business Advisor Self-Guided Client by:

[reveal_quick_checkout id=”25489″ checkout_text=”Subscribing to the Self Guided Program – It’s Free!”]
 
[/wcm_nonmember]

About the Authors

Jason Hennessey is an internationally-known Search Engine Optimization (SEO) expert. Over the past seven years, Jason has been a vigorous student/practitioner of search marketing – dissecting, testing, debunking, and reverse engineering the major search algorithms.

As the director of SEO at Everspark, Hennessey oversees search marketing campaigns for high profile celebrities, lawyers, politicians and Fortune 500 companies. Within the industry he is known as ‘The Secret Weapon‘ people call on when they want to rank for extremely competitive terms in short periods of time. Jason played an instrumental role in turning Everspark Interactive into a $1.2 million agency in only three months.

Chris Watson is a 20-year marketing veteran, with a wealth of knowledge and experience in the magazine publishing industry. Over the span of his career, Chris has won numerous industry awards for his work with the InfoLink stable of publications in Australia.

In January 2010, he partnered with three colleagues to create a full-service SEO agency called Everspark Interactive. With Chris’s extensive background and creative vision, he has helped grow Everspark Interactive into a $1.2 million company in just three months; making it one of Atlanta’s fastest growing new companies.

10 Tools to Audit Your Site

/1 Comment/in /by

Gaining clarity on where your site really is, is half the battle. SEO must be looked at through 2 lenses – lens 1 has to do with your site, lens 2 is your competition. To move forward and spot opportunities, you have to get your arms around your strengths and weaknesses and that of your competition.[wcm_restrict]

  1. SEO Book Tool Bar – A free download that allows you to see the SEO health of every site you look at.
  2. Market Samurai – We like to use this tool for competitive analysis – gives the metrics of the top 10 ranking sites on Google for any keyword/phrase.
  3. SEOMoz Linkscape – The back link checker is terrific, allows you to not only see the number of links, but anchor text volume.
  4. SEM Rush – This tool is always handy to see what keywords a site ranks for and has a nice feature in the paid version that allows you to sort by ranking.
  5. Keyword Spy – Kind of similar to SEM Rush but the parts that have a lot going for them are the real time search data that appears when you are doing Google searches + the ad words keyword checker – so you can see what every site is bidding on.
  6. Raven Tools – I’m in love with this tool. You can plug in all the keywords/phrases you are targeting and it gives you and overview of all your rankings and shows weekly progress (a bit on the pricey side but for client reporting – it rocks).
  7. Google Data Centers – Often, we’re looking at only one data center, you want to see all the data centers so do a Google search for ‘Google Data Centers’ and have a look at the real time rankings across all the Google DC’s.
  8. Rank Checker – The little engine that could. It’s such an overlooked tool but I find over the years, I still go back to it for spot checking (you’ll find it in the SEO Book tool bar).
  9. Alexa – Sure, most of us already use this tool but we can’t write a 10 tools to measure without including it – Alexa ranking is one of the best and easiest ways to track performance.
  10. Google Webmaster Tools – Allows you to see the same thing that the Google spiders see. Allows you to properly set your canacolization as well as check load times + broken links. It is also, the easiest way to get in touch with Google.

[/wcm_restrict][wcm_nonmember]

Hi there! This article is available for free. Login or register as a StrategyDriven Personal Business Advisor Self-Guided Client by:

[reveal_quick_checkout id=”25489″ checkout_text=”Subscribing to the Self Guided Program – It’s Free!”]
 
[/wcm_nonmember]

About the Authors

Jason Hennessey is an internationally-known Search Engine Optimization (SEO) expert. Over the past seven years, Jason has been a vigorous student/practitioner of search marketing – dissecting, testing, debunking, and reverse engineering the major search algorithms.

As the director of SEO at Everspark, Hennessey oversees search marketing campaigns for high profile celebrities, lawyers, politicians and Fortune 500 companies. Within the industry he is known as ‘The Secret Weapon‘ people call on when they want to rank for extremely competitive terms in short periods of time. Jason played an instrumental role in turning Everspark Interactive into a $1.2 million agency in only three months.

Chris Watson is a 20-year marketing veteran, with a wealth of knowledge and experience in the magazine publishing industry. Over the span of his career, Chris has won numerous industry awards for his work with the InfoLink stable of publications in Australia.

In January 2010, he partnered with three colleagues to create a full-service SEO agency called Everspark Interactive. With Chris’s extensive background and creative vision, he has helped grow Everspark Interactive into a $1.2 million company in just three months; making it one of Atlanta’s fastest growing new companies.

10 Ways to Improve Click Through Rates

/0 Comments/in /by

So much time is spent on trying to get more traffic and all of that can be pointless if the user experience is poor once they reach your site. You have a split second to give users a sense of who you are. When a user comes to your site, the enemy is ‘Frustration’ so think about the blockers, think about the experience, and think about implementing these 10 simple but effective conversion techniques.[wcm_restrict]

  1. Include a phone number in your meta description
  2. Make sure the title tag on your page is relevant to what they’re searching for.
  3. Include a call to action in your Meta Description
  4. Include your unique selling proposition in your Meta Description
  5. Focus on keywords that have the strongest Commercial Intent (OCI) – the OCI score can be found using the Market Samurai tool.
  6. Keep your title tag 64 Characters in length
  7. Keep you Meta Description no more than 160 characters
  8. If possible try to use the word ‘free’ and ‘you’ and ‘your’ in your Meta Description.
  9. If possible include the keywords your trying to rank for in your url
  10. Most searches happen at the local level – so mention the location of your business or service.

[/wcm_restrict][wcm_nonmember]

Hi there! This article is available for free. Login or register as a StrategyDriven Personal Business Advisor Self-Guided Client by:

[reveal_quick_checkout id=”25489″ checkout_text=”Subscribing to the Self Guided Program – It’s Free!”]
 
[/wcm_nonmember]

About the Authors

Jason Hennessey is an internationally-known Search Engine Optimization (SEO) expert. Over the past seven years, Jason has been a vigorous student/practitioner of search marketing – dissecting, testing, debunking, and reverse engineering the major search algorithms.

As the director of SEO at Everspark, Hennessey oversees search marketing campaigns for high profile celebrities, lawyers, politicians and Fortune 500 companies. Within the industry he is known as ‘The Secret Weapon‘ people call on when they want to rank for extremely competitive terms in short periods of time. Jason played an instrumental role in turning Everspark Interactive into a $1.2 million agency in only three months.

Chris Watson is a 20-year marketing veteran, with a wealth of knowledge and experience in the magazine publishing industry. Over the span of his career, Chris has won numerous industry awards for his work with the InfoLink stable of publications in Australia.

In January 2010, he partnered with three colleagues to create a full-service SEO agency called Everspark Interactive. With Chris’s extensive background and creative vision, he has helped grow Everspark Interactive into a $1.2 million company in just three months; making it one of Atlanta’s fastest growing new companies.