Social Media Marketing Madness

Social Media Marketing Madness--this says it all-and we marketers have to track it all....

The Easiest Way to a First Page Ranking on Google

A good article from Forrester that I would like to share with you:
The Easiest Way to a First-Page Ranking on Google. "If you're not optimizing your videos, you should start. "Blended search," the practice in which search engines display videos, images, news stories, maps, and other types of results alongside their standard search results, has become increasingly common on major search engines. And optimizing video content to take advantage of blended search is by far the easiest way to get a first-page organic ranking on Google," says Nate Elliot from Forrester.

• Best of all, so few interactive marketers focus on video optimization that most of the videos in Google's index aren't very well optimized -- so if you optimize your videos well, your chances of success will increase even further.
  So how can you optimize your online videos? The agencies and search engines I've talked to offer a number of different tips:
  *Insert keywords into your video filenames.
  *Host your videos on YouTube, and embed those YouTube videos into your own site. Google says its algorithms consider how many times a video is viewed, and any views embedded videos receive on your own site get added to the 'views' tally on YouTube. (And yes, nearly every video we saw Google blend into its results came from YouTube.)
  *Optimize your YouTube videos by writing keywords into your videos' titles, descriptions, and tags.
  *Embed videos into relevant text pages on your site. The context provided by the text on those pages (which is hopefully already optimized for search as well) will help the search engines figure out what your videos are about.
  *Also create a video library on your site, so Google knows where to find your video content. (Google Video Sitemaps can help with this too.) Write keyword-rich annotations for each video in the library.
  Clients can read more about this topic, including some examples and further best practices, in our reports SEO for Blended Search (a Europe-focused report) and Video and Image Optimization (which is US-focused).