Video Marketing and SEO
There is a great deal of importance now levied on the amount of media your content pages have. Youtube is as much a part of millions of websites as the text on the page. Peopel are ready and willing to support articles and information with the multimedia eye candy that Youtube can deliver, with an embedded video. Along with Youtube, Vimeo and Break.com are hot on the heels of the online multimedia giants. You will find it easier than ever to put a related video on your site, and now developers are finding increasingly popular ways to deliver this content. You may have seen Youtube video skins, which are like TV styled enclosures for the video itself, or there have been some cool effects with video walls on blogs for a number of months. What this suggests is that video is not stagnating, it is an evolving animal, just like any other form of content.
You are able to use video (and images) to your advantage on your blogs and sites, by both using video marketing, and also featuring videos and having a video section on your site. Most people prefer the audio & visual stimuli in comparison to regular text filled pages. To use video marketing, you don’t need thousands invested in a noise diffusing microphone and a 2 billion pixel web cam. All you need is tools such as Powerpoint or a free version like Open Office offers. You can put together slideshows, and convert direct to the formats that these video sites need. Once you have put a quick slide show together, simply upload to Youtube with lots of keyword specific titles and tags – and your job is done. You can then feature your own video on your own site. Syndicated video sites will pick up your video, as well as blogs, and before you know it, you have gained hundreds of backlinks for very little time…
Marketing software you may have heard of…
SEO and marketing software has become quite prolific in the last few years, as more people want to get a web presence that will actually bring visitors in, rather than being an online document thats only good for directions to a company’s offices. Amazingly, people assume that the more you spend on SEO software, the better it is. It is quite the opposite. Some high priced software actually has the same features as a couple of free tools – and that’s the truth. You will have heard these two names mentioned a lot on SEO forums, and Internet Marketing sites.
Traffic Travis and SENuke.
Let us first look at SENuke. This software bypasses SEO altogether and virtually brute forces your website on to Google’s page one by creating hundreds of links and web 2.0 content with your backlink attached. Not only will over-use of a system like this get you sandboxed by Google, but it may also happen when you least expect it (like 3 months into having a good ranking position and after you have earned Adsense money). By creating hundreds of backlinks too quickly, you are openly telling Google that you are indeed using sites to gain links – and this is against Google’s TOS. Whilst SENuke is a massively popular tool that works – you need to use it carefully. SENuke costs over $100 per month.
Another piece of software that is still doing the rounds is Traffic Travis. Whilst this tool does not optimise your site in any way, it goves you a clear cut advantage over some competitors by telling you how their site got to page one in the first place. You will find out how many backlinks the site has, and how many outbound links – along with the age & pagerank of each site in the top 10 or 20. This allows you to put together a campaign that will simply out-link and out-perform what your competitors have. Traffic Travis is available as a free tool with an upgrade being optional.
SEO Checker
You can find lots of cool tools on the web now, which will help you determine your ranking and your current status as far as SEO goes. Some tools will show you where your site is lacking as compared with the top 10 for the keyword you are trying to rank for – and others will actually copy most of this data from the best sites, and put it straight into your website. Of course, this is not a hard and fast rule. You cannot just copy what your competitors are doing and hope to rank within a few weeks – taking over from your top competitor on the first page. It is of course a science, and as such has much more variables to consider.
An SEO checker like Traffic Travis for example will check the top ten for a keyword, and also return many pieces of data that can help you check your competition (and also your own site). You can see how many backlinks are going to the page, to the site, and also what pagerank the site is for a keyword. You can see things such as outbound links and whole hosts of other data 
which will help you determine what you are up against whilst trying to rank.
Once you have gathered your data from checkers such as Traffic Travis (or Market Samurai, which has a free tool built in), you can then build a campaign around your keywords. Do not just copy what the other guys are doing though. The idea is to outrank them. So you will need lots of unique content, more backlinks, better authority backlinks, and of course a good pagerank. All this takes time and lots of effort – and the ones who shortcut these procedures often find that even with the best SEO checker – their work was totally in vain when Google does not rank them.
Resources:
www.traffictravis.com
