When dealing with marketing yourself online, these three little letters can make grown men cry and others shake with fear they may be doing it wrong. SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimization” and it’s not really as scary as you may think. It’s as important as you may think, even more so. But really not as scary as many make it out to be! You just need to understand what it does and why people fear it when creating content for their website.
Talk To Me
In all honesty, that’s all the search engines ant. For you to talk to them like you talk to your guests. To tell them what your potential customers want to know, want to learn or want to experience. Don’t try to bluff them. They are too smart for much of that.
Search engines also like to be fed visuals. Video and photos of what you do, what the guest will experience and what they may be buying. But the visuals need to be able to tell the search engines what they are looking at. That’s where many people get it wrong and where they lose the love of the Google Bot or other search engine spider.
Something as simple as the name you gave the image in your post can throw the search engines for a loop. You write a killer piece on the thrills of downhill skiing. You make a great video as well. On the post, you have all the right words, use all the right phrases. The search engine bot is loving your post until it sees an image you used on the post. Its a great photo of how to bank a turn with your ski and would be a great piece of information that people would probably be looking for. But all the bot sees is “img.19082”
People searching for how to bank a turn, using images (images can be a great resource of traffic) won’t see your image and miss your post. Neither will the search engines make the connection that the image relates to the content. What the search engine will do is send back a list of websites with that keyword(s) and yours will rank under another website that has less content, but all the right signals. Had you named the image something like “ski-boot-banking”, it would have hlped rank the post hire and given the person searching a chance to visit your website.
You may have a better post about what the person is looking for, but because your website or YouTube channel is not optimized, the search engine will push a different website or YouTube channel above yours. Missing the sale because of your SEO.
The same goes for video. Search engines don’t “see” the images, they see the coding, the tags and other technical parts that you are feeding it. You need to “optimize” the images, the videos, the headlines, the tags and the descriptions. All this is what will tell the search engines what you are posting and what they need to put in the search results.
Seeking The Connections
As the search engines get smarter, the way to feed them becomes a science. The “bots” or “spiders”, the little bits of electrons that seek out what each new video, each new blog post contains and reports back to its mother ship, is also looking for the connections. Is your website feeding a social media page like Facebook or Twitter? If it is, is that social media profile saying the same thing about your website as the website is saying about the social media page? Do the “About Me” say almost the same thing? If so, you scored yourself some extra Google Love!
If I go to your YouTube channel, is there a quick and easy way for me to jump to your Twitter feed or website? Good. if not, why not? The Search Engine Bots see that, or they see what is missing and give you a lower ranking. That’s part of Optimization.
- We can help you understand SEO
- We post optimized videos for our clients on YouTube
- We can audit your website or social media profiles for the best SEO practices that will result in better rankings, more traffic, and better conversions