Search Engine Optimization

SEO has become an essential part of marketing for both online businesses and offline businesses with an internet presence.  Many companies, upon deciding that they need SEO, struggle with deciding between outsourcing and using in-house staff. 

Typically, delegating SEO tasks to in-house staff is the most economical choice, but it may not be the best available option in your company’s situation.  Here are the pros and cons of both outsourcing SEO and using in-house SEO staff.

Benefits of Using In-House SEO Staff

• Internal staff tend to know their company’s industry better than external staff
• Cheaper than outsourcing to meet your long-term SEO needs
• They can focus solely on your website because they aren’t juggling projects for multiple clients
• They probably never utilize black hat SEO methods because they know that their job would be on the line if it were to backfire
• They can ensure that SEO is addressed in all areas of your marketing, such as web design

Benefits of Outsourcing SEO

• SEO firms tend to have more experience and are thus familiar with a wider variety of SEO tactics
• Cheaper than hiring in-house SEO staff for brief, short-term projects
• Smaller companies that can’t justify hiring in-house staff can benefit from outsourcing
• SEO firms are more likely to keep up with the constantly-evolving SEO industry
• SEO firms are not caught up in a company’s internal politics, so they aren’t afraid to provide constructive criticism and are more likely to give objective advice
• SEO firms are often able to provide faster, more significant improvement to your site’s SEO

When making the choice between outsourcing and hiring in-house SEO staff, take your company’s specific needs into consideration.  A problem that often presents itself is the fact that most companies haven’t even the slightest clue about SEO, so they aren’t fit to judge whether their internal staff members are capable of doing SEO in-house. 

If you already have staff that is educated in search marketing, by all means, take advantage of their expertise.  However, don’t assume that after taking a Search Marketing 101 course, your staff members will be ready to take care of all of your site’s SEO needs.  Just knowing the basics isn’t enough to handle the complexities of ongoing search marketing campaigns; people with limited knowledge of SEO may unknowingly employ bad practices. 

For companies that don’t have qualified in-house staff, their site’s ranking is likely to improve at a much faster rate if they outsource because they won’t have to spend time and money getting their in-house staff up to speed.  Companies that do have qualified in-house SEO staff can outsource to an external SEO firm whenever the need for additional support arises. 

Are you still undecided about whether you should outsource or rely on in-house staff?  If you think your in-house staff might be capable of taking care of your site’s SEO workload, try them out, but be sure to keep track of the results to ensure that they are truly helping you increase traffic and conversions.  Then hire an SEO firm to carry out an audit to be certain that your staff is following best SEO practices.  

Video is exploding on the web.  According to stats, the average American internet user watches approximately 3 hours of video online each month.

Since videos are now incorporated into standard search results, you can dramatically increase the visibility of your website by utilizing search engine optimized videos.  However, you have to create compelling, entertaining, and search-friendly videos that people are eager to watch and spread virally.

Although everyone and their mother can record a home video, creating remarkable videos that have good searching rankings and help you generate traffic and sales is another story.  15 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube each minute, so take the following steps to ensure that your videos don’t get lost in a sea of oblivion.

Use Keywords

Make sure to use target keywords in the video file name as well as the video’s URL.  You should also include target keywords in the title, tags, and backlink anchor text.  In addition, write a brief, keyword-rich description for each of your videos to ensure that people searching online can find them more easily.

It’s important to optimize the textual content on the web pages where you post videos so they can be found more easily.  For example, you can bundle videos with their transcripts or include transcripts in the video descriptions to improve spiderability.  And last but not least, be sure to include the word, “video,” in the title of each of your videos to accommodate searchers who are looking specifically for video content.

Distribute Your Videos All Over the Place

In addition to posting videos on your site, make sure to distribute them to various video sharing sites on the web.  If you don’t want to do this manually, you can pay a video distribution service like TubeMogul to do it for you.

And don’t forget to optimize your company’s channel pages on video sharing sites with keyword-rich content.  Additionally, be sure to place a link back to your site at the very beginning of each video’s description at sharing sites so you can drive some traffic back to your site.

Build Links to Your Videos

Just like they do with textual content, search engines judge the value and relevancy of videos based on the backlinks they have.  To help build links for your videos, make sure you enable sharing and embedding on video pages.

In addition, you can bookmark your videos, share them on Twitter and other social media sites, and link to them on relevant blog posts and web pages.  And don’t forget to cross-link your video to other relevant videos on your site.  Not only will cross-linking help to improve the search engine ranking of your videos, it will also lead to more views and make your site more user-friendly.

Increase the Number of Views

Okay.  So you’ve created a wonderful video, optimized it, and distributed it.  Now what?  You need to increase the number of views, that’s what!  Although sharing videos via social media will help you do that, there are a few other strategies you can apply as well to increase views.

For example, on video sharing sites like YouTube, you can submit video responses to highly popular videos in order to generate traffic to your own video content.  You can also pay for placements in YouTube’s Promoted Video program.  In addition, you can approach social media power users, explain to them why you think your videos will benefit their audience, and ask them to share your videos with their audience to give them a viral push.

Do you have a Twitter presence?  If not, you’re missing out on a highly effective online marketing medium.  Although Twitter status updates, known as tweets, have the nofollow attribute, they are becoming an increasingly important part of SEO because Google now indexes them and includes them in their real-time search data.

So, if you think that you can tweet whatever you want without facing any consequences, think again.  That tweet about last Saturday’s hangover could end up ranking on the top page of Google search engine results for your company name if you aren’t careful.

Steps for Optimizing Your Twitter Account

To ensure that your Twitter account has a strong search engine presence, take the following steps:Choose a relevant Twitter handle – Make sure to use a Twitter handle that’s relevant to your company/brand.  The URL to your Twitter page will include your Twitter handle (in other words, your Twitter account’s URL will look like this: http://www.twitter.com/mytwitterhandle), so make sure you choose a relevant handle.

And keep in mind that your Twitter handle should be as short as possible since you want to make it easy for others to retweet your stuff.  The longer your Twitter handle, the harder it will be for people to pay your tweets forward.

Choose a Twitter name that represents your brand – Your Twitter name is different from your Twitter handle; it’s what appears above your bio.  Make sure to use a name that represents your company/brand so people can find you easily when they search for your company name online.

Include relevant keywords in your Twitter bio – Your bio only consists of 160 characters, so make sure to use them wisely.  Include keywords that are used to search for the products/services you offer and keywords that are relevant to your company/brand name.

Tips for Optimizing Your Tweets

Start off your tweets with relevant keywords – The first words in your tweets are important for SEO because they are included in the title tags of your tweets in Google search results pages.  Start off your tweets with relevant keywords so people can find you on Google with ease.

Use buzz words – Want your Twitter account to have some weight in real-time search?  Start off your tweets with buzz words that are hot right now so you can ride the wave of whatever’s hip online.  However, make sure you always put value first.  If you’re tweeting nonsense just to rank for buzz words, your follower count will drop quickly.

Link to your content – To lead your Twitter followers back to your site and ensure that people who find your tweets via the search engines are directed to your site, tweet about your content regularly and link to it.  Use a URL shortener like bit.ly to make it easier for people to retweet your links.  Bit.ly also allows you to track clicks over time so you can determine which tweets were most popular.

How to Attract the Right Links

Google determines which tweets to feature in search results not only by evaluating keyword relevance, but also the links that Twitter accounts receive.

Amass followers in your niche – Twitter judges the relevance of your content by determining who your followers are.  So, make sure you get plenty of followers in your niche.  Google will be looking at the keywords in their bios to determine what niche your Twitter account belongs to.  For example, if you are an SEO copywriter, you’ll want to get plenty of Twitter followers that are also SEO copywriters.

Get added to lists that are relevant to your niche – This goes hand in hand with the tip above.  The more followers you have in your niche and the more relevant your tweets are to your niche, the more likely you are to be added to relevant lists.  Google will evaluate the lists you’re on to determine what your Twitter account is about.  For example, if you’re a social media consultant, you’d fare well if you were on lists with names like, “social media rock stars,” “social media consultants,” or “social media experts.”

Get people to retweet your stuff – Getting your stuff to go viral on Twitter requires that you have great content and a loyal following.  It can take time to establish an influential Twitter presence, so you can speed things up by hosting giveaways and treating each retweet of your content as a giveaway entry.  Meanwhile, your stuff will go viral and you’ll attract new followers and fans.

Are you wondering whether directory submission is an outdated practice?  With the rising costs of directory submission and the falling quality of directories, webmasters have to be cautious about how they approach directory submission.  That’s not to say, however, that directory submission doesn’t hold value.  Directory submission is still a highly effective off-page SEO tactic and traffic-building technique, but you have to know how to utilize it correctly.

What to Look for (And What to Avoid) in a Directory

Make sure that you choose reputable directories that are selective about the sites they allow to be submitted.  Furthermore, select a directory that suits your needs in order to achieve the best results.  For example, if you are trying to improve a blog’s ranking, your best bet would be to submit it to blog directories.  Other types of directories out there include general, niche, article, podcast, and regional directories.

A bad directory that’s not worth submitting to typically has tons of categories with few listings.  Furthermore, a directory is not worth your time if it receives little traffic, has a low page rank, and/or has very little content.  It’s also important to determine whether or not a directory’s interior category pages are indexed by the search engines because if they aren’t, no link juice will be passed to your site.

Another factor you ought to consider is how many links each category page of a directory contains.  The more links there are on the page, the less link juice your site gets.  For example, if there are 300 links on a page, it means that you have to share the link juice with 299 other sites.

What’s the Deal with Directories that Use the NOFOLLOW Attribute?

If a directory adds the NOFOLLOW attribute to its listings, it’s not going to help you improve your site’s search engine rankings.  However, submitting your site to a directory that uses the NOFOLLOW attribute is worthwhile if the directory has the potential to send traffic to your site. Typically, niche directories send a good amount of traffic to the sites they list because their category pages have good search engine visibility.

Don’t Be Repetitive

Once you determine which directories you’d like to submit your site to, figure out which anchor text and descriptions you’ll use.  Don’t use the same anchor text on every directory submission because the search engines do not appreciate duplicate content.

Some Recommended Directories

-DMOZ
-Yahoo
-Business.com
-JoeAnt
-Uncover the Net
-AroundTheWeb

Remember: directories are constantly evolving.  A good link today may be worthless tomorrow.  If you’re paying for a directory listing, it’s advisable to get a yearly package so you can scope out the situation every year.

Conclusion

Mass directory submission is no longer useful, but you can still get a lot of value out of submitting your site to the right directories.  Take all of the above factors into consideration and make the effort to find quality directories in order to make directory submission a worthwhile endeavor.