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.

3. Using jargon your customers don’t know- I think it’s always a good idea to get outside help with your keyword research. Here’s why: you might be too familiar with your business. In other words, you could end up using keywords filled with industry jargon that your customers don’t know about. Ask your friends and customers the types of terms they would search for if looking for your products. These are the types of phrases you should be using.

4. Not studying the competition- Competition analysis is an important yet often overlooked part of keyword research. You need to be aware of which keywords your competition is targeting. This will help you come up with the best strategy for surpassing them in the search rankings. It will also help you identify the keyword research mistakes your competitors are making so you can take capitalize on them.

5. Ignoring seasonal phrases- Almost every industry has various seasonal keywords that get high search volume for short periods each year. Many companies overlook them because they might not conduct their keyword research during the time of year when that phrase is hot, so it gets forgotten. But these seasonal phrases pose a huge opportunity for companies to increase their web presence during peak times of the year. Google Trends is a great tool for analyzing seasonal data for various keywords.

6. Thinking keyword research is a one-time action- Perhaps the biggest keyword research mistake you can make is to only research terms at the launch of your site. Keyword research is something you should be doing on a regular basis. Search trends are always changing, and new relevant keywords are always popping up. Don’t get left behind by sticking with the keywords you chose 3 years ago. Stay on the cutting edge of your industry by always conducting keyword research.

Have you made any of these keyword research mistakes?

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.

Is your CMS breaking links?

While a CMS (content management system) can make handling all of the content on your website a whole lot easier, it can also cause certain problems. For example, if you change your WordPress permalink structure but forget to make all of the necessary updates, you may start creating broken links within your website.

Fortunately, with the help of the “Web Crawl” feature in Webmaster Tools, you can normally spot these types of problems. Check out a webmaster who used this feature to discover over 60,000 HTTP errors.

Are visitors being redirected?

While there are situations where it is acceptable to redirect users based on their IP, it’s important to avoid engaging in any type of cloaking. If you have any concerns about whether or not Google thinks your redirection is cloaking, you can monitor the verification of your site in Webmaster Tools. If you notice that your website becomes unverified, you need to modify your current redirection method.

Are there any issues with your server?

As we have discussed in the past, reliable hosting can play a major role in the success of your website. If your website happens to go down and Google decides to visit, the Bot will be unable to crawl your content. While you may not normally be aware of this issue, Webmaster Tools can provide a log of any “Network Unreachable” errors to let you know that this event is happening.

How is Googlebot viewing your website?

According to Google, the goal of their web crawler is to function like a normal human visitor. However, this does not always work out properly. Common problems that Googlebot can encounter include errors such as the 404 (file not found). An unoptimized robots.txt file can also cause issues for Google’s crawler.

To find out how Googlebot is handling your website, you can use Webmaster Tools to learn about any 302, 404 or 500 errors involving Googlebot.

(photo from lzzr)

If you’re the owner of a small business, you might be tempted to implement an SEO strategy by yourself. After all, it can get costly hiring an expert to do your SEO, and there are several things you can do if you take your time to learn SEO properly. Of course, you also open yourself to making many crucial SEO mistakes.

What follows is a list of 5 common SEO mistakes that will undo all of your hard word. Avoid these at all costs.

1. Targeting Broad Keywords- Let’s suppose you operate a small business that sells doors in Houston. As nice as it would be to rank for the phrase “doors,” the truth is you have absolutely no shot at doing that. Trying to do so is a waste of your time. Instead, you should try to rank for phrases like “hurricane proof doors” or “door installation in Houston.” The more specific your keywords, the more targeted your traffic will be.

2. Keyword Stuffing- As a copywriter, this is my biggest pet peeve. People get so caught up in making sure their keywords are peppered throughout the content that they completely ignore how it reads. Your readers shouldn’t be able to tell that your content has keywords in it. It should read like any other copy. What’s the point of ranking well if your content is unreadable?

3. Design not Crawler-Friendly- In order to give yourself the best chance of ranking well, your design needs to be crawler-friendly. Even though the search spiders have gotten better at crawling flash sites, you should stick with an easy-to-crawl CSS layout. This helps the spiders go through your site in a logical manner to ensure they rank your site properly for the relevant keywords.

4. Disorganized Content- Stop trying to do too much on your webpage. Disorganized content not only hampers your site’s usability, but it also prevents you from targeting additional keywords. Divide your content logically among several pages. This keeps each page short, focused, and targeted on specific keywords. It gives you the best chance of reducing your bounce rate and improving you rankings for multiple key phrases.

5. Ignoring the User- This is probably the most common SEO mistake I see. In a way, it goes back to point #2. If you’re new to SEO, it can be easy to get caught up in tailoring your site to the search engine’s specifications. The problem comes when you place a higher priority on pleasing the search engines than your human users. You should never sacrifice usability for the sake of accommodating the search engines. Instead, you can have the best of both worlds—SEO friendly and user-friendly. Keep your site easy to navigate for both the search spiders and your users. This way, you can convert those high search engine rankings into increased sales for your small business.

Link building can be a time consuming venture for search engine marketers and webmasters. There is no easy way to go about it, link building is hard work. Google as the search engine leader wants backlinks that are meaningful to the content of the page and on topic. Business profiles can provide a safe backlink to your important web pages.

Business Profiles Equal One-Way Links
Profiles online are a good way to find free links for your website. There are pluses and minuses to profile linking. The main limitation is keyword anchor text, generally the link pointing back to your page from profile websites is a url link to your homepage. Be sure to look carefully through the profile set up when adding in your information. There are times an additional link may be added for other pages of your website, such as in the work experience section.

Watch For Nofollow Links
What is a nofollow link anyway? It can be complicated to explain. The short version is that Google recommends nofollow for paid links such as paid text link ads on websites. Nofollow generally means the link has no value to the search engines, and can also mean a “down vote” for the quality of the link. Unfortunately this practice has become more common place for many websites including websites that feature profiles. Most often this is due to spammers missusing a website to gain an excessive number of links or the website owner fears they may get in trouble from Google and the other search engines for allowing regular links on their website. For your backlink to count for link popularity you must be sure the link is a regular link.

How Do I Identify Nofollow Links?
There are ways to find out if a link is nofollowed or not. A handy tool is the Firefox extension SearchStatus. When you add this toolbar extension to your Firefox browser it highlights any link that is nofollowed making it much easier for you to identify links that are nofollowed. After downloading the tool to your browser choose “all” for the search engines, click on the “q” symbol from your browser and checkmark the “highlight nofollow links” section. You can download this helpful browser tool here:

http://www.quirk.biz/searchstatus/

The Benefits Of Business Profile Links
Beyond the links back to your website a business profile tells the visitor about your company. Don’t skimp when it comes to providing information about yourself and your company in your profile. Be sure to provide information on services or products. Careful copywriting can interest website visitors who view your profile.

One thing to watch for is the possibility of your backlinks being nofollowed after you have added your business profile. Sometimes this happens with a website and suddenly the backlink no longer counts. The best you can do in this situation is know there continues to be benefit from visitors seeing your business information online. I know, an old fashioned idea marketing your website online with no links, but prequalified traffic is never a bad thing when it comes to your website.

The Search Engines Require Quality Links
In the long run Google and the other major engines want backlinks to be quality on topic links. A business profile is just that along with the option of sharing information about your business online. Examples of profile business websites include LinkedIn and Spoke as well as many other similar websites.

Using business profiles as part of your link building program will help provide long term quality backlinks to the most important web pages of your website and make your link building work easier in the long run.

We all understand the importance of proper SEO when it comes to search engine rank.  That said, many websites continue to make many serious SEO errors.  Want to know what some of these SEO errors are?  Read on …

Mistake #1 – Not Keeping Up With Search Engine Developments

One major SEO mistake is to simply not keep up with the latest and greatest search engine developments. As you may already know, search engines are continually upgrading their algorithms.  For instance, what worked a couple of years ago may not be so effective today. Thus, it is extremely important to educate yourself about all the latest search engine trends.

Mistake #2 – Not Choosing the Right Keywords

You want to choose keywords that potential prospects will actually search – don’t you?  While you may feel good that your website is ranked number one for some extremely obscure keyword phrase, how relevant is this type of situation?  Since no consumers will actually type in these keyword phrases when they search for something, optimizing a website for these types of obscure keyword phrases does not make sense.

It is relatively easy to find ‘good’ keywords – simply use a keyword tracker to discover approximately how many “real” people actually search for various keywords that are related to you specific industry.

Mistake #3 – Using a Splash Page on the First Page of a Website

Search engines consider the first page of a website to be the “most important one” … from a purely SEO standpoint.  Consequently, why would you want to waste this valuable opportunity to promote your website?  While you may like the looks of your website with a splash page, you are doing yourself no favors at all.  Instead of using a splash page, simply fill the first page of your website with optimized quality content.  Done and done!

Mistake #4 – Not Putting Description Titles and Tags on All Web Pages

While it may seem like a bit of a hassle to some, it is vital to place description titles and tags on all of the pages of your website.  Search engines do consider the description tag to be important. Also, if you write a compelling description, users may be more willing to click on the link to your site.

Further, you should not use the same description title and tags on all of the web pages.  Each of the pages on your website is different and as such, you should describe the pages in a way that lets the search engines know what is on each individual webpage.

Mistake #5 – Not Linking to Relevant Websites

Yes … linking to other website can increase your search engine rank.  That said, when you link to websites that are not related to your subject matter in any way, shape, or form, then your efforts will be in vain.  Why?   Your link credibility will simply decrease.  As a rule of thumb, only trade links with quality websites that are actually related to your industry.

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is one of the most important things you can do to help customers find you online. For an online business this is crucial, but even their brick-and-mortar counterparts can benefit from this relatively new form of marketing.

Search Engine Optimization defined is an online marketing strategy. By employing certain keywords and keyword phrases at the correct density, you can bump your website’s listing to the top of someone’s search results, increasing your business. Entire advertising agencies have spring up around this fast-growing marketing method.

So what does this have to do with you? Everything! Regular joes like you and small business owners need to learn this tool to give your company an edge over the guy down the street with lower prices. Check out the top five reasons why you should be using SEO right now:

1. Adds credibility to your company. When someone searches for “widgets” on Google and your company is the first one to appear in the results page, the user assumes that you are an expert on the topic. This makes people more likely to trust you, and ultimately buy from you.
2. Cost-effective. You can get high-quality SEO copywriting for a fraction of the cost of traditional copywriters. If you are an excellent communicator, you can even do it yourself for free.
3. Easy to implement. Unlike a traditional print advertsing campaign, SEO is very simple to start using and can be done in minutes.
4. Results are easy to measure. There are many online tools available to help you measure the effectiveness of your SEO. Results change daily, however, so you must constantly monitor it.
5. Reach a wider audience than you would with print. When doing a direct mail campaign, you have to buy a list of your prospects, meaning you already know who they are. SEO allows you to capture the attention of people who you didn’t think would have a need for what you offer.

With all these incentives, it’s easy to see the need for a good SEO campaign. It’s not as difficult as it may appear, and lots of help is available.

Typically, a splash page is designed to catch the attention of a human visitor through use of a large graphic, a Flash movie, or some other technological item.  While this may indeed attract the attention of your human visitors, visiting search engine spiders won’t be impressed, and ultimately your human visitors will not get all the benefit they could from visiting your site.

Search Engine Spiders and Splash
Search engine spiders rely on text and links to get their work done. In the past when there has been virtually no text on an entry page, images or a Flash movie, the content of the web page has not been read and indexed by the search engine spiders. Graphic images and Flash were lost on the spiders beyond ALT attribute text for the images. Until recently Flash was unreadable to the search engine spiders.

This is now changing as the major search engines are joining together to understand and index the content of Flash movies. While this is a major improvement for search engine indexing of Flash movies in the meantime it is important to provide at minimum a title and meta description as well as a text description of your company on your main entry page using important keyword phrases. A good combination is to embed a Flash movie within a page which also uses keyword optimized text.

To see what the search engine spiders see, go to SEOChat and use their spider simulator tool at http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/spider-simulator/ and enter your website address. When you run the spider simulator, you will see what the spider sees when it visits web pages to read and index information.

Splash Pages In Search Results
Ever search on the url of a splash page? It can be a real eye opener. Try searching on the url of the web page in Google and most often you will find minimal information about the page in the search results. You can hope that the search engine spiders pick up at least the meta description and title tag as part of the search results. There are times when even this is not available in a splash page and there is no text on the page to index. The search results are what searchers click on to go to your website. If there is no real information about your website chances are slim the searchers will click the search result to find out more about your company. If this is the entry page to your website it is not a good use of your online property.

The Importance Of The Entry Page
While a search engine spider can follow text links into the main content of your website, you are wasting this splash page. To make this page most useful to your visitors and to search engine spiders, you want to put good, keyword-rich text on this (and every) page in the website.  Content is what your visitors, both human and electronic, are really looking for. Rather than having just a page of links, put some real content on the entry splash page. Websites that talk about their companies and their products and services on the entry page tend to catch users’ attention and make them delve deeper into the site to look for more information.

Make The Visitor’s First Visit Memorable
Once a visitor reaches your website you want them to stay and click farther down into your website. You never know what your visitor’s attention span is going to be, so each page on the site needs to stand on its own, and to give the visitor something useful; never waste a page as a “click here to go somewhere else” page. Splash pages are most useful if they provide information about your company to the visitor as well as information that can be indexed by the search engine spiders.