Editor’s note: In the following guest post, Fliqz CEO Benjamin Wayne reveals some of the secrets of using video to help boost the search results rankings of your website. Fliqz is an online video platform.
As most search engine optimization (SEO) experts are aware, getting a first-page Google result is harder than ever. Not only do Google’s search and indexing algorithms continue to evolve in complexity, but Google has given over more and more of its search results real estate to ‘blended’ search results, displaying videos and images towards the top of the first page, and pushing down—and sometimes off the page—traditional web results that would have otherwise competed for top rankings.
But where problems arise, so do opportunities. Although Google’s newfound enthusiasm for video has created more competition for fewer traditional search results, it has enabled sites with video assets—even sites that would otherwise score poorly in the Google index—to successfully achieve first-page rankings. In fact, Forrester Research found that videos were 53 times more likely than traditional web pages to receive an organic first-page ranking.
Here’s what a blended search result looks like for the search query ‘777 built in 4 minutes‘:
Those images at the top of the search results are video thumbnails, and today, there’s only two ways to get there:
1. Upload your video to YouTube.
The advantage of this is that you are 100% certain to be indexed into Google’s search engine. This does not guarantee you’ll get a first-page result, but at least it ensures that Google knows your content exists.
The drawback, of course, is that anyone who clicks on a YouTube result will be taken to YouTube, which may be fine if your goal is branding (i.e., you only care that people watch your video). If your goal is driving traffic, as is typically the case with SEO, this won’t be a successful strategy.
Your other alternative is:
2. Video SEO
Video SEO is a set of techniques designed to make sure that:
- Google finds your video content
- Google successfully indexes your video content
- Google will display your video content when specific keywords are entered as search terms
Here’s how to make it work:
You Need Video Content
Google is fairly flexible in what it considers to be video content. You can use actual video footage, but screen captures, slide shows, animated PowerPoint slides, and other content will work just as well. Google can’t actually ‘see’ what’s inside the video content, so it relies on title and other meta-data to determine what content your video actually contains.
Submission, Not Discovery
With traditional web pages, Google utilizes crawlers to discover and index web content. Unfortunately, Google can’t read Flash very well (although it is trying), and as a result, most video content is invisible to Google’s search crawlers. Therefore, the best way to appear in Google’s blended search results is to submit your video to Google using a Video Sitemap. This is similar to an XML sitemap, but is formatted specifically for video, and only contains information about your video content. It is submitted using Google’s Webmaster Tools.
The most common error in Video SEO is to assume that because you have submitted the web page on which a video resides, that the video content itself is being indexed.
You’ll also need to make sure that you have a robots.txt file on all video pages, to ensure that Google can easily verify that the locations on the Web you’ve submitted do in fact exist, and that they contain embed codes which indicate the presence of a video.
Title and Title Tags
When ranking videos, Google primarily considers the match between search keywords and the video title. Although Google allows you to submit other meta-data such as description and keywords, these currently don’t have much influence on your search ranking. Google likes it when the title tag of the page matches the title of the video, and will give a higher weighting for results where this is the case.
Video SEO is Long Tail
Like traditional SEO, you’re much more likely to see results with Video SEO if you target more specific, or longer tail, search terms. A video titled ‘Dog’ is unlikely to produce a first-page ranking, while a video titled ‘German Shepherd Police Dog’ will be more likely to score well in Google’s algorithm. Since Google can’t determine the actual content of the video, you might consider submitting the same video multiple times with different titles that match potential search terms.
New and Small Don’t Matter
With traditional SEO, the age of a website is an important consideration for Google in deciding its ranking. Google also considers things like the number of pages on the site, and the number of links to the site, along with the importance of the places those links originate.
In Video SEO, none of this matters. This means that even new sites and small sites can compete on equal footing with larger and more established players. Publishers who are too small or too new to even consider traditional SEO can still be taking advantage of Video SEO opportunities.
For the Foreseeable Future, Video SEO is a Winning Strategy
As time goes by, Google’s discovery and indexing of video content will no doubt become more sophisticated, and as competition for video results increases, it will become harder for sites to achieve these first-page rankings. However, the number of web pages still massively outnumbers indexed video assets, and for as long as that continues, publishers will have an opportunity to jump to the top of Google’s search results through Video SEO.
(Via TechCrunch.)
Mark Suster is a Partner at GRP Partners, a Venture Capital firm in Los Angeles. He blogs at Both Sides of the Table and can be found on Twitter at @msuster.
I’m often asked by entrepreneurs and business owners whether it is worth blogging, and if so, what they should blog about. On the first question, the answer is obvious to me — you must blog as an entrepreneur.
In this post I’ll cover why you need to blog, how to determine what to blog about, and finding your blog’s voice.
Why You Must Blog
I believe that blogging in your business is vital to creating a public personae and making your company more accessible. In an era where companies like Zappos have differentiated themselves based on service, it is important to be public and accessible.
My industry of venture capital, for example, has been shrouded in secrecy for 30 years, making the process of raising funds opaque for most entrepreneurs. When I started my first company in 1999, there were almost no public sources of venture capital fund raising information. Years later I discovered the blog of VC Brad Feld, then later VentureHacks, and Fred Wilson’s technology & VC blog, each of which clarified and demystified the venture capital process.
So when I started blogging, I mainly viewed it as ‘earned media,’ or a chance to let entrepreneurs get to know me by sharing my thoughts online with complete transparency; a concept that is repeatable for any business.
In less than a year I’ve attracted a large monthly following of readers who come to my blog to discuss how to build startups, how to raise money, and to get my thoughts on technology markets. By publicly sharing my thoughts, I’ve been able to engage in online discussions with people all over the world, and though it was an unintended consequence, my deal flow has gone up dramatically. In other words, blogging can be a valuable networking tool and help the bottom line.
What Should You Blog About?
Start by defining the audience with whom you want to have a relationship. Presumably they are your customers, partners, suppliers and your broader industry as a whole. You should think about what kind of information they would find valuable. You should also try to talk about something that is differentiated from what other blogs in your field cover, even if your approach is just slightly different or new.
Make sure the topic is something that you’ll have a passion for writing about on a regular basis. If you’re not going to keep up with your blog, you shouldn’t start one in the first place. It’s a commitment, believe me. If you pick a topic that relates to your customers, but you’re not that passionate about it, then you may have a bigger problem on your hands!
The Right and Wrong Way to Blog
Let me give some examples of the right and wrong approach to blogging.
Right: I always liked the Mint.com blog. Even in the early days when they were relatively unknown, they blogged about personal finance. They talked about how to manage credit and balance your bank account — obvious topics for a startup focused on managing personal money. They were able to take a leadership role in talking about managing your money in a way that supported their brand and created a community around their product.
Wrong: A friend of mine has a company in the personal finance space also. His blog was all about how to run a startup and raise venture capital. He was outrageous, brash and crass in his style, and I told him so. I said, ‘Your goal isn’t to be the cool kid in the venture capital circles. Your job is to build a great company and you’ll be a hero in entrepreneurial circles as a result of your success. Speak to your customers — that is what a blog is for.’
Finding Your Blog’s Voice
So you know you need to blog, and you’re convinced you ought to write about something you’re passionate about and that speaks to your customers. How can you create something that people will want to come and read every day?
1. Be authentic
The thing that kills most blogs, in my view, is when you can tell that the writer is just going through the motions. You need to find a ‘voice’ that is authentically yours. People will get used to your style and your style will become your signature.
2. Be transparent
The ‘old school’ way of getting media attention was to submit press releases. These were artificially crafted documents that were filled with glowing reviews of your company. In short, they felt fake. The best way to establish your voice is to be transparent.
Be willing to talk like a human being. Be willing to show feelings and a point of view. Let your inner self come out rather than your ‘inner bullet point.’ Don’t use too much lingo. Don’t feel like your prose has to sound like it was crafted by a university professor. Just speak!
3. Get inside your readers’ minds
I give this advice often and in many scenarios, including public speaking. When people speak to many audiences, they sometimes get into a canned routine. They give the same presentation no matter which crowd they’re addressing. The key is that each time you present, you need to think about who is in the audience and what they want to hear. The same is true for blogging.
On my blog, my audience is made of startup entrepreneurs and probably other VCs. When I write I try to be mindful of who these people are, the knowledge I assume they have, and what I believe they want to know.
4. Solicit feedback
I ask people what they want to read about. I regularly ask for feedback on what I’m writing. When people give me good suggestions, I try to cover those topics.
When community members write awesome comments, I’ll sometimes write a post about what they said to highlight them and their contributions. In my opinion, the best way to build an audience over time is to engage with them and to highlight those that really contribute positively to you.
5. Don’t be offensive or take big public risks
I sometimes read blogs that get extreme. I read a blog once that jokingly suggested ‘offering your angels cocaine if that would get them to invest.’ It was intended to be funny. It wasn’t. And comments like this run the risk of offending people. This was a blog about personal finance, and I found the comment totally irresponsible and at odds with the brand image the blogger was trying to project.
I read a blog yesterday where the author was trying to make fun of a negative comment he got on his product. The blogger highlighted him and called him ‘retarded,’ which I, and I’m sure many others, find offensive. There’s no upside to this type of comment, but there’s a big downside. My esteem for him went down.
Further, unless your company revolves around taking stands on controversial issues, it’s best to leave your political commentary at home. Statements like these stand to upset or anger half of your potential customers no matter what side you take.
6. Have fun
This may be obvious, but if writing a blog becomes a chore for you it will show. Try to make your writing fun and it will be easier to stick to. It will also reflect in your voice.
Happy blogging!
(Via Mashable!.)
Between Twitter, Facebook, and Googles new social networking tool, Buzz, its hard to turn a corner without running into another social network. But how do you know which networking tool fits you best? Were here—with big charts and all—to help.
Last week Google Buzz made us ask ourselves what we wanted out of social networking. To answer that question, we charted what we liked and disliked about setup, privacy, usability, and other aspects of Buzz, Twitter, and Facebook. Here’s the result.
This chart doesn’t cover everything about every network out there. MySpace is (seemingly) on the decline or, at best, re-purposing itself. LinkedIn is really a business contact pool, FourSquare a geo-location game, and other networks generally too niche to be compared in the same aspects and categories.
For the simple read, here’s the full chart of our Buzz, Twitter, and Facebook comparison. We color-coded each answer to give a context of where it stood, in comparison to what we know is possible and what a smart user would like to see. Red means that you can’t rely on this network for this feature. Yellow indicates that the network offers it or makes due, but could definitely be better. Green means something works, and can be considered a selling point.
Click on the chart for a bigger view, or right-click to download the full-resolution file.
There’s a lot of text there already to parse through, but it’s obviously segmented and specific to each function. Having dug into the settings of each network and debated it with my fellow editors, I’ll try to offer up a concise take on how I’d explain each network to someone completely new to any of them. I hope it might spur some thought about which network you’re using now, too, and why.
Facebook
Facebook’s strongest feature, as it stands now, is that it’s relatively easy to figure out who your ‘friends’ are. You can pull them from your webmail address book, sure, but you have to check off those you want to be a friend with, and they have to reciprocate. After that, you start seeing their status updates, photos, and other activities on Facebook.com, right when you log in. Simple enough, right? Not exactly.
You cant, or at least shouldnt, create two separate Facebook accounts for personal friends and work contacts/co-workers/casual acquaintances, all of whom are likely to hit you up on Facebook sooner or later. So its up to the user to create groups of friends, set what those different friends can see. Also, your Facebook identity is tied to certain ‘networks’—an employer, a school, a location—that you have to remember to set controls for, too. Dig around and youll almost certainly find the very fine-grain controls you might need. But then, every few months, Facebook changes up their offerings, for better or worse, and it’s up to the user to notice and re-learn how to decide what’s private, to whom, and, in a much more worrisome way, what’s being made public and search-able on the web.
Facebook does have a pretty great iPhone app, and offers a good amount of access to third-party clients like Brizzly and TweetDeck. But they’re still limited in some ways meant to drive you to the web site, and their non-iPhone mobile apps and sites are tough to love.
Twitter
What’s easy to like about Twitter is the simplicity. You get an account, you see a suggested list of famous users that you can feel free to ignore, and then you’re asked to write 140 characters about something, anything. It will be made public, search-able, and able to be re-broadcast by other users, unless you’ve decided to lock your entire account and require your permission to view it. You can follow other people, block the occasional jerk from following you, reply to others’ posts, message other users privately (if you both follow each other), and, over time, you’ll learn about third-party apps and context tricks that make the service make more sense. I started using Twitter one day into my first SXSW, and I had it mostly figured within one or two over-eager days.
That simplicity, and reliance on third-party sites and apps for picture posting, link shortening, and the like can be confusing to newcomers that aren’t into digging around, for sure. And the speed and volume of the main stream can be overwhelming and off-putting. But Twitter has grown slowly into a network that adapts to users’ needs, whether by force or through user innovation. If you don’t like how noisy and fast your main feed is, creating a list of high-priority friends and thinkers will do the trick. As you figure out what you like and don’t like about Twitter, you’ll be able to find third-party apps and interfaces that cater to those interests. We’d love to see expanded features here or there (for discovering who’s following you, and perhaps hiding certain posts from all but a few close followers, for example), but Twitter is a pretty novel solution for those who like to share short updates with the web at large.
Buzz
Whatever we write about Buzz will be slightly inaccurate in a week’s time, most likely. Buzz is brand new, and already it announced an apology and upcoming ‘fixes.’ From what weve seen, though, it seems like it wants to be the solution that FriendFeed never was to tracking your friends and contacts multi-varied interests. Some friends change their IM status to say whats up, while others post on Flickr, Twitter, their own blog, and other places. Rather than making you head to each site, or make those friends become endless self-promoters, Buzz aims to connect you to everything your friends are doing from a place youre already familiar with—your Gmail and Google contacts.
And that, of course, is where the uproar started. Buzz showed up, suddenly, inside Gmail, and when asking users to sign up, assumed too much that they’d like to turn their email contacts into people they ‘follow,’ and maybe make that following status public. If Google could reassure Buzz users that what they did on the network was only among their followers they’ve individually approved, it would be more appealing. The service also needs a dedicated home, instead of being spread across mobile sites, Gmail, Google Maps, and elsewhere, and gain better controls for how much ‘buzz’ flies at you. But it’s promising, still, because it’s not a public-type Twitter, or a walled-off Facebook, but something else entirely.
Now that we’ve run down the three biggies above, give us your take:
Which Social Network Fits You Best?(survey software)
How would you revamp our chart of social network strengths and weaknesses? What did we get right, wrong, and miss entirely? We’re open to your ideas, suggestions, and links, in the comments.
(Via Ian Scott.)
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