Orlando Local Search Engine Optimization | “10 Tips For Using YouTube To Kill At Local SEO”

Source      : searchengineland.com
By            : Chris Silver Smith
Category  : Orlando Local Search Engine Optimization

Orlando Search Engine Optimization

Here’s a local search optimization tactic that is a staple in the repertoire of many professional SEOs: YouTube Optimization. It’s particularly effective in local search since relatively few businesses have created and published video promotions for themselves.

Before launching into the technical tips for optimizing your YouTube videos for local search, it’s worthwhile to mention the content itself. While my tips below will provide benefit somewhat independently of whatever the video is actually about, all benefit derived from the work will be magnified if the video is compelling. So, subject matter and the way it is conveyed are of primary importance. I don’t mention “quality” (although that can contribute) because there are many videos of poor production quality or low resolution that are extremely popular. The subject matter of a video and the way it’s conveyed — its “interesting” — are more likely to determine whether people will watch it, whether they’ll watch all the way through, and whether they’ll share it with friends.

YouTube Local SEO

Some businesses simply make an ad about themselves when they do a video. While these can be informative for prospective customers, they are typically not all that imaginative (and usually not as effective as less overtly promotional videos).

A better approach would be to publish a series of brief videos over time about aspects of your industry, its products, and its services. Provide how-to videos that demonstrate how to do what you do. Obviously, if you sell a service, you won’t make money off of do-it-yourselfers, but these videos are typically more popular and will therefore convey more ranking potential to your business. They can also serve to establish you as an expert — and sometimes, when you show what’s involved in what you do, it will persuade people to pay to have it done.

Other types of videos can teach consumers about how to select the sorts of products you sell, or tell them how to discern qualities about services offered. These “public service” sorts of videos may train consumers in how to be more discerning and, in the process, train them to choose you instead of your competition.

Videos can be simpler to produce than you might imagine these days. Cellphones and digital cameras can shoot your videos, or higher fidelity video cams. You can also create and edit videos using numerous inexpensive software packages. A video I shot just a few years ago of the old Texas Stadium demolition was fairly low resolution compared to the dozens of videos shot with far better equipment by local news organizations, but my optimization work with the video enabled it to rank highest for a while, gaining tens of thousands more views than the videos created by the pros at the news stations! So, quality helps, but don’t get too obsessive with making a perfect video – create and publish your video, rather than get mired in the time and expense of doing something super-slick.

And so, without further ado, here are 10 tips for YouTube Optimization for Local SEO.
1. Geotag Your Video

First, you obviously should “geotag” your video in order to associate it with the geocoordinates of your business location. To do this, go into the Advanced settings for the video within the Video Manager. YouTube makes it simple by providing a search field — enter the address location here and click the Search button. The location is then displayed on a little popup map where you may further refine the location by dragging the pinpoint marker. Once saved, YouTube converts your location information into longitude and latitude coordinates for storage.

It’s grown a little unclear as to how Google uses this information at this point. In the not-too-distant past, these videos could be accessed via a layer in Google Maps, and YouTube offered an advanced option for searching for videos within an area. Both of these options are gone, but the data is still there in the background and may continue to impact whether a particular video is deemed to be more relevant for searchers according to geographic proximity. (The YouTube Trends Map displays the most popular videos on a map, but that seems to be based on the locations of the people viewing the videos.) Contextually, other things associated with the video might also be considered more relevant for its location area as well. Google may bring this data back to the surface once more, so long as the Video Manager interface continues to collect this data from end users.

2. Link To Your Business In The Description

Include a link to your business website at the beginning of the video description. Now, these links are automatically “nofollowed” by YouTube, but there seems to be ranking value of some sort conveyed from the videos to the business’s local search ranking ability. Perhaps Google transfers keyword associations with the link, while no PageRank is transmitted — or perhaps local citation value is being conveyed, since there is no way of “nofollowing” citations.

3. Include Your NAP (Name, Address, Phone), Part I

Include your business name, address and phone number in the frames near the end of the video (and perhaps your website URL as well). Text within videos can be “read” out of the data by Google’s interpretation algorithms, based on the application of optical character recognition.

4. Include Your NAP, Part II

Actually stating your business name, address and phone in the video’s audio will be worthwhile, since this may be automatically converted into the text transcripts produced by Google’s systems.

Text transcripts are now automatically generated on YouTube, if the video contains recognizable speech.

5. Utilize The Description Field

Mention your address, city location and phone number in the description text. The description field in YouTube is actually very generous, so while your initial paragraph or sentences should clearly describe what the video is about, you could also include a section after that which provides a short biography about your company (and differentiators that might persuade consumers to choose you above your competition).

6. Tag Your Video

Include your business category name and your location names as tags on the video. The keyword tags have long been one of the “secret weapons” for YouTube optimization, so add in a handful of relevant tags for each video. Tags can be multi-word phrases as well as single word terms.

7. Associate The Video With Your Google Places Listing

You will need to add the video to your business listing in Google Places, Adding YouTube in Google Places, When adding the YouTube URL in Google Places, be sure to use the full page URL and *not* the shortened YouTube URL provided for sharing — the shortened URL will not work in Google Places for unfathomable reasons.

8. Associate The Video With Your Google+ Local Page

Add the video to your Google+ Local page. Once you’ve added the video there, you and your employees can share the video on your personal Google+ streams. The numbers of shares are and indicator of popularity.  Adding videos on your Google+ Local page

9. Embed Your Video

Embed the video in your website page and/or on your blog. The number of embeds is another factor that indicates the popularity of videos. A frequently recurring question in video optimization is whether you should host videos natively (on your website) or store them on YouTube. I have come to believe that housing the videos on YouTube is the more beneficial option. The embed code can allow your video to be displayed elsewhere, and I think having the ranking factors and integration of YouTube as a top Google property provides too many benefits to ignore.

10. Promote Your Video

Further promote the video via your social media accounts, particularly on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and Google+. If you provide the video through all the various channels where you’re promoting your business, potential customers can run across it and view it.  All the various views add up to help your video in rankings. All the popularity measures may not only help the video itself to rank, but the citational value conveyed to your business may help with rankings in local search results as well.  Bonus Tip: if you’ve got more than one video, it’s worthwhile to optimize your YouTube channel with a description, link to your website, and links to a few of your main social media profiles.

Google likes videos because people like videos. This has given videos fairly good influence in search. Using these tips to optimize your video content may provide you with a very strong tool for augmenting your local search rankings!

Source  :  Searchengineland.com/10-tips-for-using-youtube-to-kill-at-local-seo-171396

Orlando Small Business SEO | 8 Things You Need to Know About SEO Now

Source       : cio-dot-com
By              : James A. Martin
Category   : Orlando Small Business SEO

Small Business SEO Orlando

CIO — Google, like time itself, stands still for no one. Over the past 18 months or so, the search engine giant has made big changes to its algorithms. Among Google’s goals: Improve the user experience by delivering relevant, fresh, quality content and, at the same time, crack down on those using questionable search engine optimization (SEO) techniques to gain an unjustified ranking position. Moz, which delivers Software as a Service SEO and other tools, even keeps a regularly updated Google Algorithm Change History. In 2012, the blog listed 37 significant algorithm changes alone. So what does all this change mean for online marketers who legitimately use SEO techniques? Have the rules of the game changed completely or stayed the same? Or are they somewhere in between?

SEO experts agree that creating high-quality content, which earns authentic links from trustworthy and/or authoritative sites, still is and has always been the best SEO practice. “What was important to do years ago is still important,” notes Cyrus Shepard, senior content producer for Moz and formerly the company’s lead SEO practitioner. Nonetheless, online marketers should consider adjusting some tactics—if not their thinking about SEO—to continue ranking well in Google. Here’s what you need to know about SEO today.

3 Pillars of SEO Today: Content, Links, Social Media

“Improving the quantity and quality of inbound links used to be the sole goal of every webmaster,” says Jayson DeMers, founder and CEO of AudienceBloom, an SEO, social media and guest blogging service, but “this method of thinking has become outdated.” Today, your business should be focusing its SEO on three “pillars” of sorts: Content, links (particularly earned inbound links from other sites that point to your content) and social media “likes,” retweets, +1s and other endorsements of your content, DeMers says. (These three points, plus five others, will be discussed in greater depth below.)

“Search engines are placing a much heavier emphasis on the combination and unification of all of these elements,” DeMers adds. “The presence of any single element plays a negligible role in the ranking algorithm. However, when all the elements are combined, there’s an amplification effect in the rankings.” As a result of the need to unify all these aspects of online marketing, DeMers believes that SEO professionals are morphing into “online marketing professionals,” adding, “SEO as a vertical has disappeared and is now simply ‘online marketing.'”

Source :  cio dot com/article/738249/8_Things_You_Need_to_Know_About_SEO_Now

Orlando Small Business SEO | “Facebook Tramples Twitter’s Turf With Media-Friendly Tracking”

Source        : theregister co uk
By                : Terry Macalister
Category    : Orlando Small Business SEO

Small Business SEO Orlando

Facebook is adding a couple of APIs that will let certain media organizations track what’s trending on the social network. Certain media partners, such as Buzzfeed, CNN, NBC’s Today Show, BSkyB, and Slate (as well as social media marketing firm Mass Relevance) will be getting access to a Public Feed API that allows them to see a real-time feed of what Facebook users with public posts are saying about certain keywords, such as “Syria” or “Apple”.

A second API, Keyword Insights, gives media users aggregated results of the frequency of keywords being used in public posts, and allows these to be broken down further based on gender, age, and location, while keeping the identity of the poster anonymous. “Starting today, selected news organizations can begin to integrate Facebook conversations into their broadcasts or coverage by displaying public posts of real-time activity about any given topic,” said Justin Osofsky, VP of media partnerships at Facebook, in a blog post.

Osofsky said that in the past year, Facebook users have mentioned the Superbowl 245 million times in public posts, making it the most commented on topic. Second was the National Basketball Association (NBA) finals, which garnered 125 million mentions, with this year’s Academy Awards ceremony in third with 66.5 million public postings. Currently, Twitter gets a lot of media attention, such as the Today Show’s “What’s Trending” segment, and Facebook wants to be part of that as well. The new APIs will also help the social network generate data that can be used by its advertising sales team to bring in the lucre.

Facebook has been making more of an effort in this field to try and get more eye-time online. Last month the firm gave a similarly select group of media the ability to embed posts in their websites, and since June it’s been supporting hashtags as well. Whether all this increased visibility will help the bottom line remains to be seen, but Zuckerberg and his crew certainly hope so. ®

Source :  theregister.co.uk/2013/09/10/facebook_tramples_on_twitters_turf_with_mediafriendly_tracking/

Orlando Small Business SEO | “Negative SEO Case Study: How to Uncover an Attack Using a Backlink Audit”

Source       :    searchenginewatch.com
By                :  Press Realse
Category   :  Orlando Small Business SEO

Orlando Small Business SEO

Ever since Google launched the Penguin update back in April 2012, the SEO community has debated the impact of negative SEO, a practice whereby competitors can point hundreds or thousands of negative backlinks at a site with the intention of causing harm to organic search rankings or even completely removing a site from Google’s index. Just jump over to Fiverr and you can find many gigs offering thousands of wiki links, or directory links, or many other types of low-quality links for $5.

By creating the Disavow Links tool, Google acknowledged this very real danger and gave webmasters a tool to protect their sites. Unfortunately, most people wait until it’s too late to use the Disavow tool; they look at their backlink profile and disavow links after they’ve been penalized by Google. In reality, the Disavow Links tool should be used before your website suffers in the SERPs.

Backlink audits have to be added to every SEO professional’s repertoire. These are as integral to SEO as keyword research, on-page optimization, and link building. In the same way that a site owner builds links to create organic rankings, now webmasters also have to monitor their backlink profile to identify low quality links as they appear and disavow them as quickly as they are identified.

Backlink audits are simple: download your backlinks from your Google Webmaster account, or from a backlink tool, and keep an eye on the links pointing to your site. What is the quality of those links? Do any of the links look fishy? As soon as you identify fishy links, you can then try to remove the links by emailing the webmaster. If that doesn’t work, head to Google’s disavow tool and disavow those links. For people looking to protect their sites from algorithmic updates or penalties, backlink audits are now a webmaster’s best friend.

If your website has suffered from lost rankings and search traffic, here’s a method to determine whether negative SEO is to blame.
A Victim of Negative SEO?

Google Analytics 2012 vs 2013 Traffic

A few weeks ago I received an email from a webmaster whose Google organic traffic dropped by almost 50 percent within days of Penguin 2.0. He couldn’t understand why, given that he’d never engaged in SEO practices or link building. What could’ve caused such a massive decrease in traffic and rankings? The site is a 15-year-old finance magazine with thousands of news stories and analysis, evergreen articles, and nothing but organic links. For over a decade it has ranked quite highly for very generic informational financial keywords – everything from information about the economies of different countries, to very detailed specifics about large corporations.

With a long tail of over 70,000 keywords, it’s a site that truly adds value to the search engine results and has always used content to attract links and high search engine rankings. The site received no notifications from Google. They simply saw a massive decrease in organic traffic starting May 22, which leads me to believe they were impacted by Penguin 2.0.

In short, he did exactly what Google preaches as safe SEO. Great content, great user experience, no manipulative link practices, and nothing but value. So what happened to this site? Why did it lose 50 percent of its organic traffic from Google?

Backlink Audit

I started by running a LinkDetox report to analyze the backlinks. Immediately I knew something was wrong:
Your Average Link Detox Risk 1251 Deadly Risk
Upon further investigation, 55 percent of his links were suspicious, while 7 percent (almost 500) of the links were toxic:
Toxic Suspicious Healthy Links
So the first step was to research those 7 percent toxic links, how they were acquired, and what types of links they were.
In LinkDetox, you can segment by Link Type, so I was able to first view only the links that were considered toxic. According to Link Detox, toxic links are links from domains that aren’t indexed in Google, as well as links from domains whose theme is listed as malware, malicious, or having a virus.
Immediately I noticed that he had many links from sites that ended in .pl. The anchor text of the links was the title of the page that they linked to.
It seemed that the sites targeted “credit cards”, which is very loosely in this site’s niche. It was easy to see that these were scraped links to be spun and dropped on spam URLs. I also saw many domains that had expired and were re-registered for the purpose of creating content sites for link farms.
Also, check out the spike in backlinks:
Backlink Spike

From this I knew that most of the toxic links were spam, and links that were not generated by the target site. I also saw many links to other authority sites, including entrepreneur.com and venturebeat.com. It seems that this site was classified as an “authority site” and was being used as part of a spammers way of adding authority links to their outbound link profile.
Did Penguin Cause the Massive Traffic Loss?
I further investigated the backlink profile, checking for other red flags.
His Money vs Brand ratio looked perfectly healthy:
Money vs Brand Keywords
His ratio of “Follow” links was a little high, but this was to be expected given the source of his negative backlinks:
Follow vs Nofollow Links
Again, he had a slightly elevated number of text links as compared to competitors, which was another minor red flag:
Text Links
One finding that was quite significant was his Deep Link Ratio, which was much too high when compared with others in his industry:
Deep Link Ratio
In terms of authority, his link distribution by SEMrush keyword rankings was average when compared to competitors:
SEMrush Keyword Rankings
Surprisingly, his backlinks had better TitleRank than competitors, meaning that the target site’s backlinks ranked for their exact match title in Google – an indication of trust:
metric-comparison-titlerank
Penalized sites don’t rank for their exact match title.
The final area of analysis was the PageRank distribution of the backlinks:
Link Profile by Google PageRank
Even though he has a great number of high quality links, the percentage of links that aren’t indexed in Google is substantially great. Close to 65 percent of the site’s backlinks aren’t indexed in Google.
In most cases, this indicates poor link building strategies, and is a typical profile for sites that employ spam link building tactics.
In this case, the high quantity of links from pages that are penalized, or not indexed in Google, was a case of automatic links built by spammers!
As a result of having a prominent site that was considered by spammers to be an authority in the finance field, this site suffered a massive decrease in traffic from Google.
Avoid Penguin & Unnatural Link Penalties
A backlink audit could’ve prevented this site from being penalized from Google and losing close to 50% of their traffic. If a backlink audit had been conducted, the site owner could’ve disavowed these spam links, performed outreach to get these links removed, and documented his efforts in case of future problems.
If the toxic links had been disavowed, all of the ratios would’ve been normalized and this site would’ve never been pegged as spam and penalized by Penguin.
Backlink Audits
Whatever tool you use – whether it’s Ahrefs, LinkDetox, or OpenSiteExplorer – it’s important that you run and evaluate your links on a monthly basis. Once you have the links, make sure you have metrics for each of the links in order to evaluate their health.
Here’s what to do:
Identify all the backlinks from sites that aren’t indexed in Google. If they aren’t indexed in Google, there’s a good chance they are penalized. Take a manual look at a few to make sure nothing else is going on (e.g., perhaps they just moved to a new domain, or there’s an error in reporting). Add all the N/A sites to your file.
Look for backlinks from link or article directories. These are fairly easy to identify. LinkDetox will categorize those automatically and allow you to filter them out. Scan each of these to make sure you don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater, as perhaps a few of these might be healthy.

Identify links from sites that may be virus infected or have malware. These are identified as Toxic 2 in LinkDetox.
Look for paid links. Google has long been at war with link buying and it’s an obvious target. Find any links that have been paid and add them to the list. You can find these by sorting the results by PageRank descending. Evaluate all the high PR links as those are likely the ones that were purchased. Look at each and every one of the high quality links to assess how they were acquired. It’s almost always pretty obvious if the link was organic or purchased.
Take the list of backlinks and run it through the Juice Tool to scan for other red flags. One of my favorite metrics to evaluate is TitleRank. Generally, pages that aren’t ranking for their exact match title have a good chance of having a functional penalty or not having enough authority. In the Juice report, you can see the exact title to determine if it’s a valid title (for example, if the title is “Home”, of course they won’t rank for it, whether they have a penalty). If the TitleRank is 30+, you can review that link by doing a quick check, and if the site looks spammy, add it to your “Bad Links” file. Do a quick scan for other factors, such as PageRank and DomainAuthority, to see if anything else seems out of place.

By the end of this stage, you’ll have a spreadsheet with the most harmful backlinks to a site.

Upload this Disavow File, to make sure the worst of your backlinks aren’t harming your site. Make sure you then upload this disavow file when performing further tests on Link Detox as excluding these domains will affect your ratios.
Don’t be a Victim of Negative SEO!

Negative SEO works; it’s a very real threat to all webmasters. Why spend the time, money, and resources building high quality links and content assets when you can work your way to the top by penalizing your competitors?

There are many unethical people out there; don’t let them cause you to lose your site’s visibility. Add backlink audits and link profile protection as part of your monthly SEO tasks to keep your site’s traffic safe. It’s no longer optional.

Source : searchenginewatch.com/article/2290087/Negative-SEO-Case-Study-How-to-Uncover-an-Attack-Using-a-Backlink-Audit