Videos create a lasting impression for visitors, engaging users to stay on websites longer and make more purchases. Research indicates that embedded videos are not as highly-valued as proprietary site-run videos. Some have reported a 55% jump in conversions after enabling videos about their services on their website!

If you or your client are looking to boost traffic and sales, getting them involved with a quality video production company might be just what they need. Make sure the video is:

High quality
Completely original
Informative
Linking to the product or services you offer directly

Happy SEOing,
Tanya

Search engine optimization in its earliest form (let’s call this SEO 1.0) was all about matching titles and domain names to products & keyword search phrases, making the site as easy as possible to crawl for Google and other engines. While these basics are indeed important to start with when building your online market, much more can be done. The businesses who still use this antiquated approach to optimization are probably looking for a 2.0 version, but end up spending up to $1,000 per month for 1.0 tips. How do you make sure your SEO company is using 2.0?

SEO 2.0 is all about improving your rank on search engines for relevant and appropriate reasons. Say you go to a job interview. Just because you dress nicely doesn’t mean you’re going to get the job. It might help, but you can’t just be an “empty suit”.

In the same way, having basic SEO practices in place is a good idea, but will probably not give you a major boost in engine ranks. Today’s SEO 2.0 focuses on how your website “behaves” and interacts with users. How do your users navigate your website? Are there sufficient incentives to staying on the site longer, keeping customers poking through your pages out of curiosity, pleasure, or need? Are your page titles accurate? Do you have unique content? These are the starter questions for SEO 2.0, and Google Analytics can help you get some answers.

Gone are the days of simply needing an excellent domain name. Google and others have caught on to the tricks and techniques used by websites looking for false leads, and they simply don’t work as well. Start looking at where your traffic is coming from, how much time visitors spend on the site, and what they are interested in when they get there.

Happy SEOing,
Tanya

Optimizing your website for Google and other search algorithms

Ever wonder where Google gets its search results? Here’s how it works:

They guess.

Google tries to automatically find every webpage in the world and present the most relevant pages in its search results.

The first rule of SEO: make yourself easy to find.

By looking at these sample search results, we see that for every website, Google displays the same “template” of information. This template includes:

1. A webpage title.
2. A page description or excerpt.
3. The webpage’s URL.
4. Supplemental info such as date of last update, number of authors on a forum thread, etc.

The Current Google Template (06/01/2009):

Google's Default Template as of June 1st, 2009

This means that your website needs title tags, meta description tags, easy to understand urls (static or dynamic), and (for best results) newly published text, images, videos, or other media on a regular basis.

Google is going to make a guess about your website no matter what, but they are biased toward trustworthy websites. (This is because they want to have trustworthy search results for Googlers.) If your site is ‘what you see is what you get’, Google considers it trustworthy.

This is the second rule of SEO:

WYSIWYG
(follow the Google Template)

Websites that give users ‘expected’ results (i.e. a hyperlink takes them where they think it will take them or info-rich, easy to scan descriptions) are more usable, more trustworthy, and so more likely to be at the top of Google’s results.

A good SEO helps you choose what info Google will display in its default template when it finds your website to draw you the most traffic appropriate to your stated goals. Google guesses, unless you tell them otherwise – and you can tell them otherwise! The easiest way is with Google’s webmaster central toolkit.