If you’re wondering what’s in store from Google for 2013, the video above shows Matt Cutts giving an elaborate explanation of what to expect.
Coming soon is the newest version of the Penguin algorithm, called Penguin 2.0. This update will have serious improvements from the last Penguin 1.0, and we should expect it any day now. The new Penguin will detect black hat SEO, go deeper into the websites, and have a larger impact than the previous updates. Sites should get ready by using Google’s Disavow Tool to defer any spammy links.
Along with Penguin, a new Panda update is coming. This update is expected to have an enormous impact on many websites and Google will try to “lower” the affects to keep from harming websites. The last major Panda update had serious impact on all websites. We should expect something similar for this one. The fact that Google states they need to “tone it down” means it’s going to be HUGE.
After punishing Interflora and a few UK Newspapers, Google will start looking into advertorials and other types of advertising that directly violate Google’s guidelines. Paying money for advertising in order to pass the PageRank is one of the issues that Google has been regularly monitoring this year. A number of link networks have already been shut down or heavily penalized.
Many users in England complained about pay day loans and other pornographic queries that appeared on Google.co.uk. Google will introduce two new changes in the area of spammy queries. One method is to detect links “upstream” in an effort to reduce the value of the spam links. Along with monitoring links in a new way, Google plans develop advanced link analysis software that will make Google’s search engine understand the linking flow better.
When certain websites present an authority in a certain field like travel, medicine, real estate, and so on, Google will try and boost the authority of those pages allowing them to top on the search result pages. This is great for existing authoritative websites but it will make it harder for new websites to join the race. In addition to handing out higher authority, Google will make another attempt at cleaning the “cluster issue”. The cluster issue was presented back in 2012 for websites that dominate the first page for a single keyword. That includes websites like yelp, and possibly even Google Maps, YouTube, or other Google entities. This is an attempt to diversify the results and offer the end-user a wider range of information.
Last but not least, Google hopes to improve the communication with the webmasters. This is great for white hat developers and we’ve already seen some improvements after Matt Cutts announced the best method for handling a manual Google penalty. When dealing with webmasters, Google announced that they will be providing more detailed and explicit information to the webmasters in their Webmaster Tools. That was something that Google was always criticized about and anyone who’s dealt with this can relate.
By the sounds of things, Google has a few good ideas that are going to help webmasters on the way. The improved communication sounds great but everyone should be prepped for both Penguin 2.0 and the upcoming version of Panda.
One of the most common occurrences with new web pages is that they reach a very high ranking on Google and in the first couple weeks of publishing, then experiences a slow ranking drop.
As this is a continuing trend for newly developed pages that have quality content, Matt Cutts has an answer to why this happens.
When a new page is published with quality content, the freshness of the content raises its ranking very rapidly. It takes Google a little while to investigate where the content came from. Time is taken to determine if the content is original, or just a way of retelling a story. After a few days or weeks, Google makes a decision which can affect the original ranking.
Matt Cutts highlights that Google is just taking its best guess based on the quality content, the keywords, and the freshness of the content. As time passes, more information becomes available. Everything then gets incorporated in the Page Rank algorithm. Ranks usually change over time as the content of the pages change, links change, and certain information becomes more popular than the other. The algorithm adapts to all these changes, and assess the web pages in order to provide the best results.
It’s hard to keep up with all the marketing hype out there, so you know we try and bring you the best. I recently caught a presentation on Vimeo for Addroid. While we usually don’t cover banner (cpm) marketing if at all ever on the Linkbuildr blog, I thought we might as well start with something fresh. Addroid is a new video banner platform that allows you to do it all at a fair price, and by fair I mean much lower than you’d expect elsewhere. I’m pretty interested by it all and I think this form of advertising is really going to be taking off, but that’s really a ‘no duh’ statement. The CEO of the company did a great presentation showcasing how Addroid works, how it all will cost and how you can get started. I also recommend following them on Twitter if you’re interested in more updates.
A lot of our clients need, must, want and absolutely have to utilize video marketing. For those who don’t know the costs of producing high quality, high definition video then you’re in for a shock. If you have to ask then…well you should know the rest of that quote. The majority of our clients are of course hotels, real estate agents and ecommerce sites and are always in need of video content. There are many great reasons why you should be marketing with video and I’ll go into that a bit here. First, I’ll try and convince you to try out Animoto’s FREE program and see if it is a must have tool in your arsenal. It’s really too easy not to folks, so don’t miss out!
The video by Rose does a wonderful job of showing you how easy it is to create videos, and how many useful options there are packed into this web software. The main idea is to create picture sideshows in a much more fashionable sense. So when it comes to showcasing products on your online shop, making a slide show of your latest property listing or just showing off the family vacation, it’s a breeze. We recently had a client whip out 25 high quality videos for us to use, all in which showcased his unique products. Guess what we saw?
His first sale by video! The videos were only shared on their Youtube profile, and since they’re unique, they made quite the jump start on their account. This meant his videos were indexing at a rapid rate, the views starting climbing and most importantly his profile with that juicy Youtube link was indexed. We honestly didn’t expect to see a sale come from the videos that quickly, but since they have some very sought after furniture that sale came fast. After further inspection we started to see a few of his videos were already ranking in the top 5 spots for his target keyword, and that meant a onslaught of highly targeted viewers were watching the video. Luckily we make sure each video description includes a link to the direct product, along with a unique to Youtube only description.
So what else? The videos were next used on their social media accounts including their Facebook Page, Twitter account and on their blog. The videos were also added as embeds on the actual product pages which is a great thing to do in an ecommerce shop. Why you ask? Well let me give you two great answers. First up it adds more content to your page, and looks more complete in my opinion. Secondly, we noticed a huge increase in the time-on-site due to the people sitting there and watching the 90 second video. The bounce rate is better, the customer is more happy and our client seemed to be the happiest of all. They were not expecting, or thinking, about the overall benefit to video marketing. Really it’s a no-brainer, but it’s just another tactic in a sea of marketing options one can take advantage of.
There are tons of social video sites out there in which you can use your videos and build a few extra links. These won’t be ultra-awesome authority links, but they’ll add a nice and diverse hit to your link profile. This is something we love to make sure out clients have going on. After a couple months, we also noticed sites like Squidoo, Hubpages and social media scapers embedding our clients videos. We have no problem with this because some included their link, it made the views and ratings go up and that’s key to ranking those videos. For those who don’t know how easy it is to rank Youtube videos for long-tail keywords are missing out!
Video is a standard feature now more than ever and the press release sites are finally catching on. I wanted to round up a few usable resources for everyone to utilize in their next release. I have yet to test the results out myself, but I’ve been helping clients get out video releases more than usual lately. The more your prospective clients or future business partners can see a real person interacting with its audience, the more you will stand out in your industry. I only had a limited amount of time to write today so feel free to add sites in the comments, and read this interview with Greg Jarboe from the video marketing Pros at ReelSEO.
– PRWeb’s “Media Visibility” package includes the embedded video feature for $360 per release, a more economical approach than other major news wire services featuring online video
While I have yet to get my rear in gear and do some quality videos for Linkbuildr, I’ve managed to get some done for my various marketing projects on the side. I can tell you now I quickly learned and suck at being in front of a camera, and my video creation skills are lacking to say the least. I recently found Animoto thanks to a client of mine who made some really slick videos for his Ecommerce shop’s products. I’ve been using it ever since and I can safely recommend the product to anyone who doesn’t have the time or skill to make quality videos for marketing. There isn’t a whole lot I can cover here as the video above does the job very well, so just check out the pricing levels which range from free to affordable for most small to large businesses.
In this video interview, Greg Jarboe observes that there are more YouTube videos watched each month in the US (10 billion), than there are searches on Google. Businesses can’t ignore this medium!
He cites an example of a very small business — a Sierra weekend rental property — that developed a simple video starring a Golden Retriever named Monarch, to make the point that this was a pet-friendly property. They’re now booked every weekend.
Perhaps the most famous small business example is Blendtec.com blenders that emphasized their product’s sturdiness by blending objects such as iPhones in a series entitled, “Will It Blend?” The company’s sales soared 700% as a result.
Greg Jarboe is president and co-founder of SEO-PR, an SEO firm that specializes in optimizing press releases, videos, etc. Greg is the author of YouTube and Video Marketing: An Hour a Day. This interview was taped in December 2009 at the Search Engine Strategies (SES) Conference in Chicago.
A lot of people have already done amazing blog posts on video SEO, and I’m hoping to go a little deeper with this post and give you folks some great resources for not only ranking a video, but distributing it properly. It’s no secret that you can get a Youtube video ranked very easily for very competitive keywords, but there are a whole slough of options you can use to market your video beyond that. There are also ways you can use social media sites to make sure your video gets more views, and hopefully is decided upon by Goolge that it should rank well. Sometimes you can just luck out and name the video after the keyword you’re targeting and hit hold, otherwise you might have to work at it a little.
Doing Video SEO is pretty much the same as link building, at least the mind set and thought process. When I take on a link building campaign for a client who’s site is authoritative in their niche it allows me to attack on a whole other level. Because that site -most likely- has great content, I can hunt down places that would want to link to it. The same principles are in play here, great content should attract links so make sure you’re producing a quality video. If you’re pushing a product, either your own or via an affiliate campaign, the person is going to judge heavily on how your video comes across. This could make or break your campaign, and let’s face it, it won’t have any chance of going viral if it stinks.
Getting Your Videos Out There:
There are hundreds of video sharing websites already and there’s no real need to get your video out to all of them. Keeping track of the top video sharing websites wouldn’t do you any harm, and I usually only submit a clients, or my videos, to the top 10-12 places available. Since there are a ton of them, you can most likely find a few that are based solely around your niche. Thanks to the good folks at Reel SEO, you can find their most awesome and recently updated list of video sharing websites. There’s no need for me to list any here because that will take care of all your video needs, as well keep you busy for hours!
Ok so I’ve got my video ready, now what? Well uploading your videos is the first step, but this can become a very tedious task if you’re doing it a lot. I’ll go into a couple services that might help you with that before going into optimization.
Hey!Spread is my top pick for mass video uploading for a variety of reasons. Now this is not a free service, but that’s fine because it isn’t cheap to run this kind of business. With Hey!Spread you can easily upload your video to the top 20+ social video websites on the net. You can either choose to pick which ones to upload to, or have it automatically grab your videos from Youtube and download them and then proceed to get up to the other video sites. Hey!Spread is also a very well designed site with an interface that a child could use, so you shouldn’t have a problem getting things figured out. Prices for this service are very reasonable and are based on a credit system that you can pay as go, or get billed at the end of the month. A single credit costs .05 and this is the pricing chart from their website;
Tubemogul is another great video distribution and stastical analysis web app that can save you oodles of time. They also have a free version which is defintely worth checking out because you can do up to 100 video deployments a month. This should give you some idea of what this tool can do for you before diving into a larger campaign.
TubeMogul’s analytic technology aggregates video-viewing data from multiple sources to give publishers improved understanding of when, where and how often videos are watched, track and compare what’s hot and what’s not, measure the impact of marketing campaigns, gather competitive intelligence, and share the data with colleagues or friends.
There are a few things to remember to help target the keywords you’d like your video to rank for such as title, keywords and the description. I know I may be insulting your intelligence with that last sentance, but I just had to make sure….The one thing you might not have thought about when naming and tagging your video properly is that services like Squidoo, Hubpages and other social media sites can pick these videos up. I’ve noticed with a few clients that with the right tagging their videos started showing up all over the place. This really did wonders for their views as well I noticed the videos started showing up in the top 10-20 SERPs.
Social Video Marketing:
There are other ways of attracting views your your video content beyond just uploading to the tube sites, optimizing for SEO and sending to friends. There are a whole stream of interesting and niche video sharing communities that let you showcase your work, build niche channels and spread the good word. All this helps build up your videos and provide them with an edge over your competitors while reaching the top of the SERPs. Just remember that your video content is going to have to be top notch to really make it above and beyond. Let’s take a look at a handful of cool social video sites that can improve your videos stats;
Squidoo of course is a great place to make unique content pages and I sometimes like to make them just to showcase my video work. As well, I mentioned earlier in this post that if you title and tag the video correctly it might show up on other peoples Len’s. This same general principal goes for the other social content creation sites like Hubpages.com and Gather.com. If you’re hitting a hot niche you’re most likely going to have that video picked up.
MeFeedia is a online video sharing community that allows you to submit your embeded videos from other video sites. This is the type of 2.0 site that can help a great deal in getting your video to go viral, or at least get some more hits. You can also network easily by joining groups related to your niche and making sure your video gets added.
Vodpod is a cool video sharing community site that has been growing at a rapid rate and is showing no signs of slowing down. They have embeded videos from over 6000 sites….yes you read that right. The reat thing about Vodpod is not only can you promote your videos, you can also get a link back to the RSS feed providing the content. If you use this wisely you can snag a nice juicy link back to your original content page, whether that be the video itself or your blog. One last little great feature is the ability to create blog widgets with selected videos for your blog, or to share with anyone else!
Videosift is a social video site that takes in popular videos and they’re voted on like Digg or Reddit. The site offers a bunch of features like channels, playlists and a section called Beggar’s Canyon which allows new good videos to get a better chance at votes. This site is also great to push a good video because they receive a large chunk of traffic daily.
Gawkk is another social video site that you allows you to vote popular videos to the frontpage as well share videos with friend and members. All the usual features are there such as channels, groups and user profiles. This social video site is not as popular, and seems to be half a year old but it has been showing growth.
VidsLib is yet another social video site which allows users to vote videos to the front page. There’s nothin too special about this although it used to be ranked sub 10k on Alexa but has seen a massive drop in traffic. I’m not sure if a different site used to be on the domain, but judging by the content that was on the frontpage there’s not a whole lot of user activity anymore.
Yidio is a very cool and relitively new video search engine that is full of only the top quality videos under every niche. They have just dipped under the 10k mark on Alexa so well promoted videos will get your content a good chunk of views. Another great feature of this site is that it is an Adsense sharing social video site, so it never hurts to get the extra cash.
Video Bomb is the last social video voting site I’ll mention before I exhaust my readers. It is pretty much the same as all the rest, has a lot of traffic and has stayed at a steady growth rate over the past year. The only thing I would warn you folks about is there is usually a decent amount of “sexy” videos promoted to the front page. Not really a problem for me but some of you folks might not want to promote on this site.
Paying Your Way In:
This eventually might fall under the Google slap someday but I feel its fine to talk about it because marketing is war! This only works, usually, if you have a really good video to promote so don’t bother trying it otherwise. There is no trick or secret, just hunt down popular users on $insertvideosite and ask them if you could pay them to showcase your video on their channel. Some users have so many followers it’s an easy way to start off the campaign. You could also hire these popular users to create a video for you or do some sort of company review. If you have a product, why not ask if you could send it to them to review. Statistics recently out have stated that 81% of consumers read reviews online about a product before buying…that number will rise so why not have a viral review video going around?
Where To Go From Here:
Well the above list of places to also try and get your video noticed is just a small amount of really popular sites out there. I highly recommend keeping an eye on Mashable, Feedmyapp and Killerstartups for new and upcoming video sites you can promote on. There are also a plethora of options still listed on those sites I didn’t have time to dig out.
If you’re a company or indivual with smaller budget video marketing can be a little discouraging at first, but do your best to keep refining your content and creating powerful social accounts. After a few months of video promotion and adding friends you will start to see when video marketing becomes a very powerful tool. I’ve made so many videos that took days to finish to only have a few hundred views in the end, and others I’ve made goofing off and collect over 2 million views.
Video Marketing Resources:
Reel SEO – The leading blog on video marketing and SEO with so many resources it will make your head spin!
Matt SEO – A leader in the viral video marketing ranks who has been doing online marketing since 1994. If you haven’t heard of Matt, you haven’t been looking hard enough!
Single Throw – If you need a viral video created and distributed to the masses you should probably check out these folks.
Find out the results of a year of high volume content marketing on guests blogs taught us money still talks. Read the results!
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Negative SEO Attack?
Check out the anatomy of a "negative SEO" attack on our own site in our latest post. There's too much worry about these attacks happening, but I wouldn't worry too much about it. Come read what I think and just what to do if anything like this happens to your brand.
