Did you read that last week about….?? Probably yes. The internet’s virality means news travels fast, so keeping your blog up to date with the latest news is probably not within your resources, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t keep it current.

Current gives power

Just as the current down your electricity wire drives  your computer, so the current content on your blog, social media channels, website should drive your traffic. You want to give people a reason to come back again and if they know your site will be regularly updated, or your tweets will be relevant they will keep an eye on your activity.

Current means relevance

Posting about your favourite football team’s latest game is great if you have a football engaged following who come to you for that sort of thing, but if not, don’t waste your time or theirs. Create a niche and stick to it. Ideally if you are the only person able to provide that information people will know to come to you. Either way, make sure you post it as quickly as possible before somebody else gets the information out there and you lose your advantage.

Current means well timed

Of course there is always a fine balance between time of the essence and timely. Especially if you are tweeting your content you need to pay attention to when your audience are most likely to be listening or watching. If you post at midnight but your followers don’t usually engage until 9am, you are more than likely wasting your tweet that will be lost on the timelines of your followers by the time they check Twitter.

Current adds value

If your site is constantly up-to-date, your post regularly on Facebook and your Twitter feed is kept active, people will believe in you more. By showing more effort – providing you are not posting just complete tosh – people will build more trust and respect for you. Your content is often the first impression on potential new customers, even before they think about using your products, so it can be vital in improving your potential reach.

Providing current content is your way of showing your customers you are busy and committed to your business. If your existing content isn’t current, deal with it today, yesterday is too late.

Share and Enjoy

Comments

Extending your reach is all about being re-tweeted, shares and increasing your likes. The more people see your brand on the timelines of those they follow, befriend or like, the more likely they are will follow, befriend or like you too. Brand awareness obvious plays a big part in that but in addition, people are beginning to put big faith in recommendations from others they know and trust. That’s something Google are now seeking to capitalise on with social search integration, so it is not to be ignored.

You have at your disposal potential free advertising by using those of your followers who retweet you wisely. They are effectively your brand advocates and you should ensure everything you do considers how they will react to it. So it is essential you identify your key influencers as soon as you can.

There is no single way of identifying who is a key influencer, it can be heavily dependent on what your social media aims are, as to how key that person actually is for your business. To help though we’ve categorised key influencers into three main types:

Re-tweeters and super sharers

These are the ones who love to share, but rarely compare. To some they will be a pain, clogging up timelines with post- after-post of often inane chatter on irregular topics but to others they act like a news channel, streaming new ideas, thoughts and best still brands to those who follow , track or like them. If you have a high number of re-tweeters have a think about how best to write your own tweets so they get maximum impact once re-tweeted. Serial re-tweeters will often not comment but simply forward on your original tweet, so make sure any outsider will understand who the original tweet was from and what the message is all about.

Popular people

In terms of kudos, having your brand mentioned by a celebrity – whether an a-lister or z-lister – is something most brands will aim to achieve. If they do, make sure you interact with them. If they have mentioned you or any of your products respond back with thanks. Don’t over flatter them, but if you can engage them in a short exchange you will have more chance of their large followings becoming aware of your brand

Influential people

As we’ve said throughout the 123-reg A-Z of Social Media, quality of follower can often be much more important than quantity and while popular people sharing your posts will help, you will gain more authority yourself and probably a greater conversion rate by having those interactions with people already highly respected in the their fields.  They may only have 600 or so followers, but you can be sure if they recommend something their followers will sit up and take notice.

For your own social media influence to grow you probably need a mix of all three types of influencers. How that mix is made up and works together will be very dependent on your existing following, your products and the way you use social media. However, it is important you research what types are already in your circles and followings. Using software such as Sprout Social, HootSuite, Klout etc you can quickly identify what type people fall into. Check the people who re-tweet or share your content most – they are probably your super-sharers. Check your followers with the highest followings to identify your popular people and then check the Klout and other social indices to find your influential bods.

If you are staying on top of your competitors social media activity you can probably fairly easily identify other populars, influential and sharers that could be relevant to you too. It is an on-going process too. People will change their habits over time – perhaps as they get to grips with different aspects of social media, so make sure you are regularly reviewing things. Once you have identified them, make sure you look after them too, they should be your VIPs in terms of followers so when they shout make sure you are paying attention.

By knowing, understanding and look after your key influencers you can take much of the leg work out of trying to build your social media network, they will help build it for you.

Share and Enjoy

Comments

We’ve highlighted the SEO value in YouTube before, as the second largest search engine in the world, you are fool not to be featuring your brand, but it appears few people know about a YouTube feature that not only expands your reach but can also improve your SEO.

For every video uploaded you have probably optimised the description and Keywords fields but have you used every tool available?

YouTube has a helpful transcription facility designed to help you reach out to the hearing-impaired audience but which also acts a great SEO tool too. YouTube’s closed captioning service can literally put words to the pictures as they appear in the video.

The machine transcription system effectively works via voice recognition and actually is not one of the most accurate of its ilk but even the experts appear to have been stumped at creating total accuracy in this field. However, the automated processing can be easily overridden and edited, so spending a few extra minutes can make your transcription word perfect and the effort will bring a big boost to your organic search.

Here’s how to use the tool:

1. Upload and save your video to your YouTube channel

Remember to include an engaging headline, relevant keywords and a full description of what your video is about

2. Use YouTube’s Machine Transcription

Once your video uploads select it from your list of videos and click click the edit link. Next click on the Captions and Subtitles tab. You should now be presented with “Available Caption Tracks” with a checkbox beside “English: Machine Transcription”. Click the download button and let the system work it’s magic.

You may be presented with the following message “Machine Transcription is available for the videos in this Channel. To enable Machine Transcription for this video, please ‘Request Processing’. We will try our best to get some results in a few days.”. In which case click the “Request processing” button and allow the system time to try to carry out  the transcription.

3. Edit your transcription

Once you have transcription you can download the same and edit it in any text editor. You can amend any errors and typos and event arrange the correct words with the correct video sections. Be careful to ensure the time coding is kept intact and is accurate to the location of that text in the video. You will see the formatting is fairly logical but this is usually the part that creates problems for people.

4. Upload your captions

Once you are happy with the transcript simply upload it to the video under “Add a Caption Track”. Before you set the video live check the captions are in sync and correct by watching the video through. Click the cc symbol on the bottom right of the video screen to kick the captions in. If there are any errors you can easily correct any errors by repeating the process above. If it works send the video along with the captions live.

Now sit back and watch the traffic roll in. As well as providing vital subtitles to the hard of hearing your captions will now provide a transcript for search engines to trawl. It effectviely provides them with a complete catalogue of every word used in the video including any vital keywords. To add extra value download the completed transciption file and save it to your computer. On this version strip out the timecoding references and then use the text to create a blog article to support a page you might embed the video on.

Have you used YouTube captions to good effect?

Share and Enjoy

Comments

Google announced recently that it has improved the way sitelinks appear. The newer version is expanded and it’s presented as a column of relevant links.

Now when people search for a site they instantly see a greater idea of what your site includes.

The purpose of this update is for users to get to the information they need easier and faster. By showing them the most relevant links, they no longer need to go to the site’s homepage and then navigate through it to get to the information they’re looking for.

So, this is how sitelinks look like now:

Who can benefit more from the new sitelinks?

Aside from the user who’s saving time with searches, there are also the big brands that are benefiting from this change.  Let’s think about it – the new version of sitelinks takes up a lot of space on the first page of results, which equals to less space for its competitors or less relevant sites.

This means that users will pay more attention to the main result and less to the ones situated below. To big brands this translates to an increased number of conversions coming from organic visits and powerful keywords.

So what should be your next move?

You should focus more on optimising your content correctly and on website architecture – site structure, URLs naming, etc.

What do you think about Google’s sitelinks update?

Share and Enjoy

Comments

Our recent blog on creating your YouTube campaign proved very popular so we thought we’d try and help with some more YouTube tips and tricks. Not many marketers are aware of how valuable YouTube is from a SEO point of view. If the videos that are uploaded to your channel are optimised correctly, you can get great results.

If you already have a YouTube channel set up, it’s important to know how to optimize your videos . The process is simple. Once you’ve uploaded your video to YouTube, include a title, a description and some tags to go with it.

For instance, on our 123-reg YouTube channel we’ve uploaded several videos explaining what is a domain name, how to choose a great domain name and so on. Let’s take for instance this video that explains how to register domain names.  The title as well as the description includes the keywords we are targeting – domain name and register a domain name.

Start the description with a link back to your website followed by a short paragraph that delineates what the video is about. For example, our description looks like this:

“http://www.123-reg.co.uk/ – To register a domain name you need to first check its availability: mysite.com. This search is done through a domain name registration company, like 123-reg.”

The description you include will appear in search results on Google and your video will show up as a result of a search using the keywords you’ve targeted.

As a last step, you have to fill in the tags for that video.  You should first include your main keywords and then variations of those. For instance, for our video here are some of the tags we used: “domain, domains, domain name, register domain names, how to register a domain, check domain availability”.

Don’t forget to check out the new 123-reg YouTube channel.

Share and Enjoy

Comments

However good your SEO, the key aim is always to get a higher listing in search engine directories. So when one of those search engines shares tips on optimising your site for SEO, it’s worth taking notice, after all they should know what works and what doesn’t.

On the Bing Webmaster Centre Blog last month Duane Forester who runs the public outreach side of the Webmaster program for Bing gave 18 tips on how to best optimise your website.

The 18 points are not comprehensive apparently, but designed to cover “the important aspects you should look at addressing”.

Certainly worth a look and if you are designing a new site from scratch, well worth using as part of your template.

We suggest you read the full blog but if time is short make sure you memorise these 8 definite no-nos:

•     cloaking
•     link buying
•     like farms
•     link farms
•     three-way linking
•     duplicating content
•     auto-follows in social media
•     the thin content approach

Have you seen any other SEO tips direct from search engines?

Share and Enjoy

Comments

The importance of labelling your images correctly for SEO purposes

Image: digitalart / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

We publish articles on blogs to build authority and find search engine delight. We spend lots of time researching to come up with fresh content and we try to make the most out of every piece we publish. But being a writer nowadays doesn’t refer to just writing a piece and hitting the publish button. If you want your post to be found, you need to optimise it before it goes on the web. And when I say optimisation I don’t mean just content. I mean titles, URLs, tags and, yes (!), images.

You have no idea how many images there are on the web labeled as IMG. It’s such a shame, especially since most blogging platforms make it so easy to label photos. There are millions of beautiful photos out there that no one’s going to see just because they weren’t labeled properly. Who do you think is searching for doimg14576.jgp on Google images? No one, you can be sure of that.

Google can’t see your images but it can most definitely read their descriptions. If you have no description, it’s like your image doesn’t exist. Think about it. Images take valuable space on your site, in your posts, and you’re wasting it, when you should be taking advantage.

It’s so easy to optimise images that you just have no reason not to do it. Set a unique title, an ALT text and a description with relevant keywords for every image you include in your article so that search engines know what they’re “looking” at. This will help you get some extra traffic when people are searching for images using certain keywords.

We are extremely visual. When a user is searching for restaurants, hotels or any service or product for that matter, he’s interested in a written review, but he’s even more interested in seeing pictures because seeing is believing. Don’t lose a great opportunity to get some more traffic on your site when it’s so easy to optimise your images. Make this a priority, not an afterthought.

Do you optimise your images? Let us know via your comment below.

Share and Enjoy

Comments