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Posts Tagged ‘sem’
SchipulCon 2011 – The Web Marketing Conference
Wednesday, October 5, 2011
SchipulCon is October 6th and 7th and if you haven’t registered yet time is seriously ticking. Don’t miss out on everything geeky and awesome!
The two day conference will be full of amazing speakers flying in from around the country and has three main topics – profit, reach and create.
Picture yourself here this October 6th and 7th, the Norris Conference Centers at CityCentre in Houston.
For the SEM & SEO Enthusiasts…
Schipul’s fearless SEO leader, Caitlin Kaluza will be speaking at two different sessions:
- Metrics for the Real World: A look at the ins and outs of the metrics world and customizing your analytics program and expectations for your business and demographics.
- Beyond the page: Optimizing your website ‘stuff’: The best ways for adding and sharing content strategically and how to learn from your site’s traffic patterns
Other speakers include Carter Cole from BrandExtract, the creator of the popular Chrome extension SEO Site Tools. Carter will be speaking about just that – creating Google Chrome extensions! Brian Wheelis from Facebook may also touch on SEO and Facebook.
The Must See SchipulCon Speakers
- Dries Buytaert, the founder of Drupal…need I say more?
- Nicholas Skytland & Steven González with NASA, yes seriously, NASA!!
- Brock Wagner, the founder of Saint Arnold’s Brewery, the most delicious beer ever to come out of Texas.
- Brian Wheelis, Manager of Agency Management Operations for Facebook
The list doesn’t end there. Check out all of the SchipulCon speakers and register today. There are even one day tickets for those who can’t make it to both days. If that’s not cool enough, tickets will also be sold at the door!
Just for reading this entire blog entry The SEM Blog would like to offer you a sweet discount off of SchipulCon tickets with this promo code: schipulpal
We look forward to seeing you!
HOWTO: Optimize Your YouTube Videos for SEO
Wednesday, August 3, 2011
Are you making the most of your YouTube presence? Have you optimized your channel? Added title, descriptions, and video tags packed with relevant keywords? Do you know about video transcriptions and what they can do for your SEO? Read on as we cover how to optimize on YouTube.
YouTube Video Optimization Tips from the Schipul SEM Team
It’s important to optimize your videos for the best ranking. Fortunately, YouTube is very SEO friendly. In today’s blog post, we’ll cover some informative tips on how to optimize your YouTube videos and channels.
Optimize your video title
Your video’s title tag can be up to 100 characters long including spaces, which means your title tag can potentially include up to 15 words. Use these extra characters to optimize by including your companies’ name and adding relevant keywords to your title. For example, instead of “Slot Trenching Video” use “Slot Trenching | Hydro Excavation | T-Rex Services.” This client example includes not only the title of the video, but an informative keyword as to what services they provide, and the name of the company making the video at least three times as searchable.
Add keyword rich descriptions and tags
Video descriptions can include up to 5,000 characters. That is a lot of text but use it wisely. Include informative information with relevant keywords but not to overwhelm the viewer. Remember they are visiting your YouTube video page to watch your movies, not read your content so keep it clean and concise. It’s not uncommon to find a few links to a web page for more information in video descriptions.
Also remember to use your video tags. For some reason, people tend to post videos without any including tags. These are an essential place to input keywords for improved searchability and top ranking in YouTube and Google searches. Tags have a 120 character limit, including spaces. Use them wisely! But most of all, use them.
Can’t think of any more good keywords to fill up those 120 characters? A secret tool to use within YouTube itself for key phrase ideas is the autocomplete suggestions feature found in YouTube search boxes. Start typing in a relevant keyword and YouTube will show you what is commonly searched for along with that first term.
Add transcripts to your videos
Make sure your videos are spider crawlable by creating transcripts and making closed captioning available to your viewers. Not only is this great for any potential viewers who experience hearing problems, but search engines are able to crawl your text transcripts.
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How do I transcribe my videos?
YouTube allows for users to request a machine transcription of your videos. It does it’s best to try and transcribe the video for you, but in reality, this is a buggy option. Instead, take the time to manually upload your own transcript.
Open a new file in Notepad and prepare your transcript. A transcript file must be saved as a plan text file with no special characters. To seperate captions, be sure to use double line breaks.
For example, your transcript may look like this:
Once you have your transcript, log into your YouTube account to upload it to your video.
- Mouse over your username located in the upper right corner of every page.
- Click My Videos. You will then be directed to a page showing your uploaded videos.
- Find the video to which you’d like to add captions/subtitles and click the down arrow located to the right of the Edit and Insight buttons. Select the Captions and Subtitles button from the drop down menu.
- Click the Add New Captions or Transcript button on the right hand side of the page. You will be prompted to Browse for a file to upload.
- Select a caption/subtitle or transcript file to upload. If you are uploading a transcript (no timecodes), select Transcript file, otherwise, select Caption file.
- Select the appropriate language. If you wish, you can also enter a track name.
- Click the Upload File button.
After you’ve uploaded your transcriptions, YouTube uses speech recognition technology and does it’s best to sync the text of your transcript to the audio of the video.
Click here for additional info on how to transcribe YouTube videos.
For the finished product of a well optimized YouTube video check out our Google+ Button Overview video screen shot:
Notice the well optimized title tag, description (links to further information included), and plenty of tags (bonus points for the geo-targeting). Video also includes a keyword rich transcription.
We hope you’ll find these tips useful in optimizing your YouTube presence. Have any others to add? Share them with us in the comments section.
Google Announces Places Changes
Monday, July 25, 2011
Google announced Thursday that Google Places pages have undergone a few very important changes. You’ll notice that third party reviews are now gone from Places pages. These changes come as a result of other consumer ratings websites like Yelp, Citysearch, and TripAdvisor claiming that Google was using their content without permission.
Places pages will still link to these third party sites for a more well rounded search experience but only after showing Google user reviews. Google will no longer integrate the actual reviews from any other consumer rating websites into the page or the Place rating system. Take a look at the photo below to see what this looks like.
Another important change to note is that Google is now emphasizing a call to action at the top of companies’ Places pages with two new buttons encouraging users to “Write a review” and more easily upload photos from places they’ve been.
Having stellar, yet genuine, user reviews are a great way to bring in business and encourage new customers to try your services and check out your business. Places photos also do a lot to help your search engine optimization efforts. Not only do they give your customers visual insight to your company, they also get indexed in Google images. In order to optimize your Places presence, encourage your happy customers to write reviews directly on your Google Places listing.
Expect more Places pages upgrades to roll out soon. Google also notes forthcoming advancements for increased user personalization of local searches, as well as platform and device flexibility.
For more information, view Google’s official statement on “The Ongoing Evolution of Place Pages.” For more do-it-yourself SEO tips from the Schipul SEM team, visit our DIY SEO page.
