SEO Hosting Blog

As a blogger, there’s many times when I need to create online video tutorials to share with my readers. Adding videos to your blog posts can help capture people’s attention, add different incoming traffic ports, increase the number of people who read and subscribe to your blog, and boost your organic ranking in search engines. The question is, where is the best place to upload videos to?

I can say that determining the best place to upload your videos to is up to you. The reason is because there are advantages and disadvantages with using different services. Below, I have included a copy of the same video that I uploaded into multiple online video sharing sites and also included are my opinions about each. You can review each video and read my opinions about each and determine which online video sharing site is best for you.

YouTube.com

YouTube.com is the most popular online video sharing site online. I would recommend using YouTube because of the added SEO value and traffic you can pipe back into your web site and pages. The disadvantages of using YouTube is that your videos will degrade in quality, and they can NOT exceed ten minutes in length. Because of the time limit, I was not able to upload my video to YouTube.com. Another thing that bothers me is that YouTube.com doesn’t inform me that the video isn’t going to process.

Yahoo! Video

I was actually quite impressed with Yahoo! Video. It has similiar qualities to YouTube.com, but doesn’t have the time restriction. The quality seems to be the same as YouTube.com. The disadvantages, in my opinion, is the lack of traffic, and SEO value. Uploading and processing the video didn’t take long at all, about 15 minutes.

MotionBox Formally AOL Video

AOL Video has been discontinued and traffic is being redirected to a service called MotionBox.com. I decided to give MotionBox.com a try and I am pleased with their service. The process of uploading a video was very clunky and not very systematic. The end result was a video higher in quality compared to YouTube.com and Yahoo! Video. The audio didn’t render quite as well. The disadvantages of using MotionBox.com is the clunky interface, lack of traffic, and I am sure lack of SEO value.

Vimeo Video

I enjoy using Vimeo a lot. It’s one of my favorite places to upload videos to. The interface is very user friendly and the uploading process is conducive to productivity. The problem I have with Vimeo is that it can take up to 30 minutes to batch videos if you have a free account. While this is annoying, I do understand and appreciate their business model. A premium account can be had for under $60 / year, which is very fair. The video and audio quality is amazing. The sharing features are brilliant. One of the things I enjoy most about the sharing features is that Vimeo will do the math for you when you’re customizing proper sizing.

Viddler Video

Viddler reminds me a lot of Vimeo but slightly lesser in quality, but much better than MotionBox, YouTube, and Yahoo. Viddler doesn’t quite match the quality that Vimeo can produce, nor do they offer the robust sharing features. A neat feature about Viddler is the fact that you can record videos on the fly, meaning you don’t have to use desktop software, such as Camtasia, to create the video. With Viddler, you can use record directly on their site.

Where Is The Best Video Sharing Site?

My vote goes to Vimeo. I would recommend upgrading to a premium account simply because it’s affordable, gives you a ton of more features, and it supports their efforts and helps keep them online. In my opinion, even the free account is superior to the other services.

After publishing this article, my strategy will be to use YouTube.com for it’s natural resource of traffic and SEO value. From there I’ll use Vimeo to actually display the videos direct on my pages so that readers can experience the best quality and ease of sharing with others.

I just found out about this and figured it would be an excellent opportunity for you to learn more about SEO. It’s a free online Webinar being offered by Jason McDonald. This online training course will be covering the top ten free SEO tools. It’s one thing to have free SEO tools floating around the Internet, but it’s a complete different ball game when you know how to use them. Jason McDonald aims to change that and teach Webinar students about some very good SEO Tools and most importantly, how to use them.

Jason McDonald is a search marketing teacher and trainer with eg3.com and a hi-tech publisher. He is a well known journalist in Silicon Valley and has managed eg3.com’s SEO, Internet and search marketing, and pay-per-click advertising programs since 1994. Jason McDonald is very qualified to teach this class, and I have no doubts that students will leave the Webinar having gained a lot of knowledge.

There’s two classes available. One on Thursday, Oct. 8th at 11:00 A.M. and the last class on Oct. 12th at 9:30 A.M. In order to attend the Webinar class, you’ll need to register ahead of time. Attending the class is absolutely free. The only thing you need to bring with you is your ears and something to write with to take notes. To view full details and to sign up, visit Jason McDonald’s SEO Webinar Registration Page. Drop a quick comment and let us know if you’ll be attending.

Keyword research is one of the most important factors in the success of your SEO or PPC campaign. When done properly, it will improve both the quantity and the quality of your website traffic. But if you make mistakes when conducting your keyword research, you could be shooting yourself in the foot.
Which mistakes should you avoid? Here are the 6 most common keyword research mistakes.

1. Targeting keywords that are too broad- Let’s say you own a company that sells tables. As nice as it’d be to rank #1 for the term “tables,” that’s not happening in this lifetime. Instead, you need to go after long-tail keywords like “glass top dining tables” or “contemporary dining tables.” Focused keywords like this will give you a better chance of ranking well and receiving targeted traffic to your website.

2. Choosing keywords with no search volume- Long-tail keywords will be the bread and butter of your website traffic. However, there is a fine line between a good long-tail phrase and a keyword that no one ever searches for. If a keyword gets no search volume, don’t waste your time targeting it. (more…)

Keyword research is great…but then what?

In previous posts, I have talked about tools that can help you when you are performing keyword research. As most people who have even a basic understanding of the SEO world know, keyword research is absolutely crucial if you plan on figuring out what you should be optimizing your website to rank for in the search engines. At the end of the day, if you don’t know what people are searching for in search engines, you really can’t optimize for any specific keywords or search terms.

Although a lot of people have a solid grasp on the concept of conducting keyword research, things get a little more fuzzy when it comes to taking action on the information that has been collected during the course of the keyword research. I think the reason that most people aren’t as confident about how to actually use their keyword research is that most blog posts don’t focus on the action aspect of this task. However, I would like to change that today, and give you some actionable information that you can use to start taking advantage of all the keyword research that you have performed.

Order Your Keywords Like Your Website: While you probably have a list that is ordered by the search volume of the keywords, you need to take things a step farther. You’ve got a good start, but you need to break the keywords down into groups so that they are easier to use in relation to your website.

While some people do things differently, the most logical approach to this step for me is to group your keywords like your website. For example, your navigation may go something along the lines of home, categories, sub-categories, individual topics, etc. So, go through your list of keywords, and break them down into groups that can be applied to these different areas of your website. You can keep them in order of their popularity, but just be sure that the groups align with your website’s structure.

On-Page: Once your keyword research has been broken down into actionable groups, it’s usually easiest to begin with the basic on-page changes. The main on-page changes that you will most likely want to make are including your target keywords in the title, incorporating them into the meta descriptions for your pages and ensuring that the keywords are actually used without your content (remember, keyword density isn’t something you should be worried about).

In addition to these changes, you will want to look at incorporating your keyword research into your internal linking structure. Whether it’s navigational links or deep links, adding keyword rich anchor text to your internal links can definitely benefit your rankings.

Off-Page: The main use of your keyword research in relation to off-page action will be working on getting links with keyword rich anchor text. Obviously, you want to have a varied profile for the anchor text of your backlinks (having all incoming links with the exact same anchor text can actually hurt your rankings), but knowing which keywords to focus on for some of your links can have a major impact on the rankings of your website.

Although you may have your own opinions about why Google provides these tools, you do have to admit that they offer some top notch tools for webmasters.  In addition to Google Analytics, another offering from Google that has grown significantly in its ability to provide value to webmasters is the Google Webmaster Tools set.

To show you some of what Google Webmaster Tools can do for your website, let’s look at five fairly common questions that a website owner may have, and how Google Webmaster Tools can be used to find out the answer to these questions.

Has your website been compromised by a hacker?

Although no one wants to think about their website being hacked, the fact is that it happens all too often.  This is especially true for bloggers or website owners who are using open source platforms like WordPress (which I personally love, but will admit is suspectible to hacking, especially when not updated right away).

In addition to using Google Alerts to monitor if your website has been hacked, you can also use the “What Googlebot Sees” feature to find out if hackers have been adding spam to your website. See this example from Google Groups about a webmaster discovering adult keywords hidden in his website.

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