Here’s a couple of example links; the first is a link to the White House’s website, the other is to Distilled’s new US website.
Written on February 5, 2010 by admin
Filed Under: book, marketing, seo
Don't ignore digital assets in your optimization efforts
Don’t fight it: Blended search results, and hence digital asset optimization, are here (at least for now).
Text content may be your SEO poster child, but with images, video and audio content often appearing in standard search results, digital assets can no longer be treated as the ugly stepsister in the online marketing family. Many companies produce a variety of content and media that never make it to the public web.
To this point, the majority of marketers have either overlooked or ignored optimization of non-text digital assets. In fact, a recent Forrester study found:
- Less than 20% of marketers insert keywords into the filenames of videos on their sites
- Even fewer marketers write keyword-rich captions or create online video libraries
- Yet video stands about a 50% greater chance of ranking on page one of Google
If digital asset optimization isn’t on your radar at all or simply stuck on your back burner, it’s time to rethink your strategy.
Show your digital assets a little respect with these 5 optimization tips.
1. Do your homework on the SERPs
Be sure to become familiar with the types of files and media types that Google and other search engines are prone to display for the keyword phrases you’re targeting. Certain types of queries are more prone to show local, shopping or news results and if you can identify frequently used data sources, your time figuring out what digital assets to optimize can be a lot more efficient.
In the example below, a search for “Apple iPad” shows search results from News, Twitter, Images and Video. Here, news sources range from mainstream media like CNN to ezinearticles. A savvy SEO would consider how they might leverage exposure in the news area, via social media such as blogs or Twitter as well as videos and images. Producing, optimizing and promoting relevant video and images provides an additional opportunity for visibility in addition to web pages.
The display of blended results, especially where current news is involved, is dynamic. Be sure to revisit the search results page from time to time to uncover any new data sources for assets/media you may be able to focus on.
2. Repurpose content to get the most bang for your buck
Think of innovative ways to reuse your digital assets to gain maximum search benefits. For example, if your CEO gives a presentation at an industry event:
- The presentation can often be recorded on video and audio
- The video can be optimized and promoted on both your website and numerous video hosting sites such as You Tube
- Multiple short video snippets can be created from one master video, all of which can be optimized
- A search-optimized podcast can be created from the audio, which can be placed on your website and promoted on podcast web aggregation sites
- Screenshots can be taken from the video, optimized, placed on your website and promoted on sites like Flickr (check out these tools for optimizing images from Six Revisions blog)
- The optimized images, podcast and video can all be used with social media press releases for even more exposure
- The PowerPoint from the presentation could be uploaded to Slideshare and turned into a video with voiceover for sharing on video hosting sites
For even more ideas on re-purposing content, read “Green Online Marketing: 5 Ways to Repurpose Content“.
3. Use keyword-rich file names and tags – but keep them clear and to the point
An important element of digital asset optimization is using keyword-rich files names and tags for all images, video and audio, and ALT text for images.
That said, an even more important element is ensuring files names and tags accurately and concisely describe the digital content being presented. As much as you’d like to fit the keyword phrase “circuit breaker” into the file name for an image of a pink elephant, it just might not work.
Think of ALT text, file names and tags like this: If someone couldn’t see your image, watch your video or listen to your audio, would they know what it is from your description? Be sure to link to your digital assets using keyword anchor text.
If you have a large number of videos, PDFs or Audio files, consider creating a sitemap file that links to each of them. Include descriptive text next to each link as well. You might even benefit from creating a video sitemaps file for Google.
4. Leverage optimized landing pages for digital assets
Some poster children and ugly stepsisters might never find a way to live in harmony, but optimized text and digital assets don’t have to suffer the same fate. Include optimized on-page text a part of your optimization strategy for video and podcasts to get the best of both worlds and maximize search benefits.
For example, place videos and podcasts on their own optimized landing pages on your website. Include either keyword-rich transcripts or summaries on the landing page, depending on the length of the video or podcast.
Optimized landing pages help the search engines understand what the video or audio is all about. Plus, you’ll enhance the viewing or listening experience for visitors by giving them a high-level overview of the video or podcast.
5. Don’t forget other file types such as PDFs and MS Office Docs
If you’ve got PDFs on your site, don’t overlook them in your search engine optimization strategy. True, you could convert PDFs to HTML pages. But particularly in the B2B world, customers are looking for case studies, whitepapers and technical articles — and PDFs can still be useful for content-heavy pieces.
Keep in mind a few points for optimizing PDFs:
- Ensure PDFs are text-based (vs all image)
- Create a SEO friendly PDF template for use corporate-wide
- Include anchor text links where relevant
- Optimize the copy as you would a web page
- Complete all document properties, including author, subject, description and keyword
This Search Engine Land post offers additional tips for optimizing PDFs for search.
Any other document types that Google can crawl, index and rank are also opportunities for optimization.
Are You Ready to Treat Digital Assets as One of the Family?
Incorporating digital asset optimization into your overall content optimization plan doesn’t have to be difficult, but it can create an important advantage. If you’ve got the digital assets, why not optimize them? You’ll make it that much easier for the search engines to find and index your content – all of it.
What results have you experienced from optimizing images, video, audio and the various document types now found in Google search results?
Learn more about digital asset optimization at SES New York, where TopRank Online Marketing CEO Lee Odden will be presenting his insights into digital asset marketing strategy, process/workflow and measuring success.
![[StumbleUpon]](http://www.toprankblog.com/wp-content/themes/TopRank06/images/stumble-big.png)
![[Google]](http://www.toprankblog.com/wp-content/themes/TopRank06/images/google-bookmark-big.png)
![[Facebook]](http://www.toprankblog.com/wp-content/themes/TopRank06/images/facebook-icon.gif)
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Tags: dao ,family ,image ,image optimization ,images ,marketing ,online ,search-engine ,seo ,seo tips ,video
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Written on January 28, 2010 by admin
Filed Under: searchengineguide, seo
by Stoney deGeyter
The following series is pulled from a presentation I gave to a group of beauty bloggers hosted by L’Oreal in New York. Most of the presentation is geared toward how to make a blog more search engine and user-friendly, however I will expand many of the concepts here to include tips and strategies for sites selling products or services across all industries.
Heading Tags
Heading tags are certainly no magic solution to building keyword relevance. They are merely one more baby step to creating a well-rounded optimization of a page. Adding heading tags using your keywords may or may not make a difference in your keyword rankings, but nonetheless, balanced against the rest of the page, using a heading tag properly, with keywords, is going to benefit your visitors, if not the search engines.
On the search engine front, at the very least, the Heading tags (H1, H2,… H6) can be used to tell the search engines the hierarchical structure of your page’s content.
When developing content, it’s pretty easy for visitors to see how the page breaks down, but search engines need a bit of help. The heading tags are that help.
Think of headings as you would an outline of an important paper. At the top is the Title, in this case the H1 tag. Next would be the Main points; In an outline they would be I, II, and III. In HTML you would use the H2 for all of them. Next we have our sub-points A, B and C, or the H3, and following that sub-sub-points of 1., 2., 3., or the H4. You get the point from there.
An alternate strategy would be to use your H1 for the title as noted above and the H2 for a sub-title. Then you’d start with the H3 for your main points I, II and III, and go down form there. You can go all the way down to the H6, but its rare that you have a page with so much content that this is warranted.
One of the problems I often see with heading tags is that they are used by developers for the site’s navigation. In a way it makes sense, you want to segment different areas of the navigation with headers of their own. The only problem with this is that you end up using valuable hx tags in an invaluable area and you’re diluting the effectiveness of the heading tags in your content where they would otherwise be most effective.
If your developers are intent on using hx tags in the navigation elements then make sure they stick to the lower level H5 and H6 so you can use the higher level tags in the content where they’ll make the most impact. Make certain that they don’t use the H1 tag for the logo, that’s a complete throwaway and prevents you from gaining any effectiveness with an H1 tag in your copy.
All of the tags can be used repeatedly on the page, depending on where they fall in the total hierarchy, except for the H1 tag (or H2 if you are using it as a sub-headline.) Be sure to use it only once on the page.
Alt Attributes
Alt attributes, commonly referred to as “alt tags” allow you to add descriptive text to your images. The visitors generally won’t see the alt text unless, in Firefox they mouse over the image or they have images turned off.
The alt text is meant to be a replacement for the image should the image not show. Make sure your alt text reads properly and adds something for the reader who doesn’t see the image. The text itself should describe the content or visuals of the image for the visitor. This text also provides much needed information to the search engine, especially if the image contains text. That text should be included in the image.
Using Alt Attributes in your image tags can help you in a number of ways. 1) it provides a greater context for the text on the page which can be factored into your search engine rankings. 2) It can help your images come up in image searches, which can drive additional traffic and conversions to your site.
Text-only browsers, or browsing with images turned off still happens, probably more frequently than we know. People on slow connections will often turn their images off in order to speed up their browsing experience. Without alt text, an important element of your pages won’t be available to them.
There are also a good number of visually impaired web surfers that use screen readers to deliver the content of web pages. The screen reader will read the image alt text, which means if the image is important to the visitor’s experience on the site, not having an alt attribute can be detrimental.
Finally, many people browse the web on mobile phones. These phones are almost always slower than the typical internet connection and either the phone’s browsers won’t display images or users will turn the images off so they can browse faster. This is generally not the case with smart phones, but there are still a lot of non-smart phone users out there.
The most important area to use alt tags is in your navigation. Whether it be your header, footer or side-bar navigation, any place images are used be sure to supplement them with alt text. Failure to do so could make your sit unnavigable to any visitor that isn’t seeing images.
Missed a part of this series?
Part 1: Everything You Need To Know About SEO
Part 2: Everything You Need To Know About Title Tags
Part 3: Everything You Need To Know About Meta Description and Keyword Tags
Part 4: Everything You Need To Know About Heading Tags and Alt Attributes
Check out our small business news site.
Original post:
SEO 101 - Part 4: Everything You Need to Know About Headings and Alt Attributes
Tags: a-good-number ,alt attribute ,attributes ,content ,firefox ,heading ,image ,images ,keywords ,phone ,reader ,search-engine ,seo ,tags
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Written on January 25, 2010 by admin
Filed Under: book, marketing
Pope Benedict XVI has been the Holy See for almost five years, and during that time, he (and the Catholic church along with him) has become more and more involved in social media. Last year, he launched a YouTube channel, social media outreach initiative, and apps for Facebook and the iPhone. And now he’s urging parish priests to follow his lead into the Internet.
And just to show how with-it he really is, this message is from . . . the future. (No, really—it’s dated 16 May 2010.) For the 44th World Communications Day, the Supreme Pontiff noted the advancements in communications thanks to the Internet, and said (will say?):
Priests are thus challenged to proclaim the Gospel by employing the latest generation of audiovisual resources (images, videos, animated features, blogs, websites) which, alongside traditional means, can open up broad new vistas for dialogue, evangelization and catechesis.
(Vocab lesson: evangelization: preaching the gospel; catechesis: teaching the doctrine.)
Naturally, of course, the 82-year-old pope must have a staff dedicated to maintaining these sites with videos and messages from the Bishop of Rome—and yeah, it was probably their idea. But hey, the Sovereign of the Vatican not only signed off but has continued to participate with his image and messages, and he’s the one urging local priests to become similarly involved.
Many priests and deacons are already active in the Catholic blogosphere, but the official impetus is new. In the end, reaching parishioners where they already congregate (well, outside of church 
) is always a good idea. And it seems pretty forward-thinking for a church that old and that large.
What do you think? Will the Pope’s support of priestly blogging mark a change in the way local officials relate to their communities?
Original post:
Holy Blogosphere, Batman! Pope Urges Priests to Blog
Tags: a-good-idea ,advancements ,and-catechesis- ,been-the-holy ,book ,catholic ,communities ,gospel ,image ,marketing ,sovereign ,will-the-pope
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Written on January 11, 2010 by admin
Filed Under: Object
This morning I reported that Google was showing a topless Playboy model on the new Fast Flip portion of Google News. It seems like the image and result is now gone, but we found it a bit funny to see that on Google News.
The result, which is shown below, was not complete nudity – [...]
….
Go here to see the original:
Google News Fast Flip Featured Topless Playboy Model
Written on December 30, 2009 by admin
Filed Under: book, marketing, seo, stuntdubl
Posted by randfish
What a year! From traveling to software development, saying goodbye to old friends and growing the team with new ones, we’ve had a tremendously exciting 12 months at SEOmoz. To celebrate, next week, on Wednesday, January 6th 2010, we’ll be hosting an informal meetup at the Elysian Brewery on Capitol Hill
Written on December 14, 2009 by admin
Filed Under: Object
Google is testing a new interface for their Image Search feature. The interface allows you to see an infinite number of image results in the search results, simply by scrolling. This works similar to how Bing Image Search currently works, where you do not have to use the pagination to see more results. [...]
….
View original here:
Google Images Testing “Infinite Scroll” Search Results
Tags: currently-works ,for-their ,google: images ,image ,image-search ,infinite-number ,interface-allows ,new-interface ,not-have ,pagination ,search ,works ,works-similar
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Written on December 7, 2009 by admin
Filed Under: marketing, seo
Personalization of search results has long been a point of great interest and contention in the search world. The battle has raged on, particularly regarding Google’s personalization efforts, about privacy for the Google user and how it will affect the search engine optimization industry.
One of the ways that Google’s personalization efforts have been ‘limited’ is that the only people that have any personalization measures applied to them were those who were logged into their Google account. That was the case at least until last Friday when Google announced that their personalization efforts now apply to everyone regardless of whether you have a Google account or not.
cnet reports
Google keeps a history of your Web searches for up to 180 days, using what it says is an anonymous cookie in your browser to track your search queries and the results you most frequently click on. For several years it has allowed those with Google accounts to receive customized search results based on that history, but now even those without Google accounts will receive tailored results based on a history of their search activity, Google said in a blog post late Friday.
So what’s the big deal? Well, if you are an SEO practitioner it means that your job gets a bit harder but this should be no surprise since this change has been happening for years now. What makes this one different is that it now applied to all searches. What is going to make privacy watchdogs antsy is the fact that is an opt-out program. Sure, Google made a nice video and explained this process in their blog but the overwhelming majority of Google users don’t even know Google has a blog and don’t care. Also, they don’t pay attention to this kind of stuff so opting out is a nice PR move but not likely to be widely adopted.
So as to limit the confusion here is Google’s chart on how this whole thing shakes out. Please excuse the quality of the image.
Hope Google finds exactly what you are looking for! Don’t forget to opt-out if you’re creeped out!
See original here:
Google Search Gets Personal With Everyone
