Some of the most popular websites online offer videos and photos – does yours?  Now that Google has announced the Universal Search Model, you SEO job just got a lot broader.  With the Universal search model, Google will search through all types of media – not just text – to find related entries.  But how do you search engine optimize video?

Blinkx has created a whitepaper that discusses the ins and outs of video optimization.  The whitepaper covers:

• Cleaning and conversion of metadata
• Optimizing titles, description and filenames
• Leveraging sitemaps
• Utilizing Media RSS
• Content Management
• Where to submit
• What to Avoid

Something to think about over the weekend…. What types of video do you have and how can you use them to leverage your SEO strategy?  If you don’t have video, what can you create? 

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It’s Friday and most people are dreaming about the weekend or making plans to have a special time with the special mother in their life for Mother’s Day.  So today, we’re going to focus on a couple of super-quick website quality checks you can make to ensure that you’re site is in top-notch shape for the weekend:

Broken links checker
It’s inevitable.  Over time, some of the sites that you’ve linked to will have moved or shut down, so it’s important to periodically check for broken links. 

Quick Code Diagnostics
Poodle Predictor allows you to see your site as search engine’s view it.  Enter your URL to see how a description might look in the search engine results page.  The description you see won’t be how every search engine will display your site, but might reveal some changes you need to make to define the view in various search engines. 

The coolest part in my opinion about the Poodle Predictor is the Diagnostic View.  After entering a URL, click the Diagnostic View link to discover any places were you could optimize quickly (such as H1 tags and titles)

Blog Backup
I know someone that lost their entire blog and tons of valuable backlinks along with it.  What a mess.  The 13^th of each month has been officially deemed blog backup day.  With the right tools backing up your blog is fast, easy, and will give you unbelievable peace of mind. 

Back up your Blogger Blog

Back up your Wordpress Blog

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There are lots of SEO Tools out there to help you gain perspective of your website from a search engine’s point of view. Perhaps the most fun and intriguing are those that allow you to learn more about your competitor’s SEO strategy.

Get ready to spend a few hours going down this rabbit hole… here are 5 of our top picks for tools that reveal SEO insight on your competitors:

Spy Fu:

Find out who’s paying what for online advertising among your competitors. Spy Fu is the follow up to Googspy.com and offers tons of features. Because SpyFu is currently in Beta, some of the data may be a few months behind, but incredibly insightful nonetheless.

Cost: Free

Niche Watch

Before you go spying on your competition, you have to know who they are. Niche Watch gives you a quick overview of the top 20 sites you must compete with to take the top spots. You’ll also get an overview for each competitor about of the number of backlinks to the page, backlinks to the domain, on-page keyword count, number of pages indexed in Google, and more.

Cost: Free

SEO SpyGlass

Shows you at a glance all the techniques your competitors are using to gain a foothold in the search engine rakings. By analyzing their tactics, you can formulate an optimization strategy that’s a step ahead.

Cost: $87 for a professional license

NeboWeb Search Engine ScoreCard

This nifty little tool allows you to size yourself up next to your competitors. Compare page rank, inbound links, on-page optimization factors, and ranking position for keywords in Yahoo, Google, MSN, and AOL. This tool doesn’t offer too much information you can take action on, but shows how you stack up to the competition.

Cost: Free

The Way Back Machine

There is something very rewarding about looking back on your competitors websites over the years. You’ll see how their websites have changed and gain insight about how their strategy has changed over the years as well.

Cost: Free

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Not every company can afford an SEO team right now. And chances are good that if your running on a tight budget, you’re also running on a limited amount of time. For you, we’ve compiled a list of 5 fast and simple things you can do to optimize your website:

#1: Break up long pages of text into multiple shorter pages.

Not only do search engines tend to favor shorter pages and smaller file sizes, but shorter chunks of content are also more user-friendly. By breaking up your longer pages of content into multiple shorter pages, you’ll bulk up your website with more pages of related content.

#2: Use keywords in H tags.

Instead of bolding text and increasing font size for your page headings and subheadings, use your Heading tags (H1, H2, etc). When you use keywords in your H tags you are telling the search engines that these are key terms for this page and worthy of a prominent ranking in the search results.

#3: Add a Sitemap:

From an SEO perspective, the goal of a sitemap is to ensure that every page on the site can be easily indexed by search engine spiders. Because spiders “crawl” websites, they need to be able to reach each page of the site from any one page. A good sitemap ensures that this is possible.

#4: Add content frequently:

When you add new content, you are essentially inviting spiders to come back and visit more often. Even if you’re busy, find the time to write at least 250 to 300 words of relevant content to add to your site on a weekly basis. Just think, if you did this every week, your site would have 52 new pages by the end of next year!

#5: Optimize title tags:

Title tags are such a simple thing but can be very effective in terms of SEO. The title tag for each page should be unique. Make sure your title tags include the specifics keyword or keywords you are targeting on the page.

A full scale website optimization project can take months of work by an entire team of software developers, copywriters, link building specialists, and a project manager with an extensive knowledge of SEO to oversee the entire project. More than likely, the competitors holding the top spots for your target keywords employ an SEO team.

We hope however that these simple SEO friendly adjustments will give you a rankings a boost and jumpstart your online success. We wish you the best in your online business building!

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On page optimization refers to a number of markup and content elements on a website. First off, when we talk ONPAGE, we mean on the actual webpage. Whatever task the SEO specialist undertakes, he or she is making it to the website coding. The SEO modifies and edits the markup.

It does not take a rocket scientist to understand on-page optimization because it mostly deals with the content and the Meta tags of your website. A critical mistake that many make is considering that content is just a bunch of keywords or that is should just be some sort of filler for the pages.  The keyword and topic-rich content of your website is a hallmark for a search engine that must determine what your site is about, but it’s also the force that will intrigue and convert customers and keep them coming back.

On-page optimization may not boost your page rank, but it surely can make your website more compliant to the standards of the major search engines. On-page optimization makes your site crawlable and easy for search engines to index.

Search engines can’t read images and other types of multimedia (video, audio, flash etc.). Thus, the text is often the most critical element that causes your site to rank well for your target keywords.  Search engines look for various clues within the markup on the page to determine the most relevant keywords on a website.

TITLE TAG: First they search for the title of the page.   A title tag offers the most important hint about the content on the page. 

HEADER TAGS: Headers (or headlines) are supplemental to the title, so if the same keyword is contained throughout those tags, you get relevance credits from search engines.

URL (page address): Search engines also scan the URL of the page itself. So it is important that those URL’s contain the keywords you are targeting. Search engines think that if the same keyword phrase appears in the title tags, the header tags and the URL, then there is a strong likelihood that this is keyword phrase defines the topic of the page.

Meta tags: Even though some search engines don’t regard meta tags as crucial to indexing and ranking, they still play a significant role in on-page optimization. Some search engines still use them to display your page in their lists. Try to make them different for every page on your site.

Hopefully, on-page optimization makes more sense now. If not, check out our “WHAT IS SEO?” section for more details or drop us a line via our CONTACT FORM.

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