As an SEO consultant in Los Angeles and Hollywood area, I have a few clients that are in the entertainment industry therefore they create many videos and multimedia that make them available for their users online. Of course they want to make sure they are indexed and search able by Google. Well one day to ensure that can happen is to make a video site map.
Google webmaster central has released some information on this I invite you to check it out.
Keep in mind you don’t have to be in entertainment industry to make videos. Many companies are now producing videos to promote their companies by informing and educating their users about their products and services. The way they do that is by making testimonial videos, educational videos, or even advertising videos to grab users attention.
For example, a client of mine that is a payday loan lender, Payday Loan Trust, is currently in process of making videos to educate their users about payday loans. That can also help them to gain their users confidence, educate them, and it should also help them with organic search ranking and increase traffic to their website as Google and other search engines love content that is geared toward users. And we all know videos are considered good content as long as they are build with user in mind.
Most beginner or intermediate SEOs don’t know exactly what Over-optimization means so I would like to attempt to explain it. There are two types of Over-optimizations; Onsite and offsite.
Onsite Over-optimization: This refers to keyword stuffing or using the targeted keywords too often in your content. Many SEO’s make mistake of writing content only to tweak the search engines not to write good quality for their users. And search engines in particular Google web spam filters can detect that and can cause negative effect on your ranking. The best content is the one that is written for your users. Of course you want to make sure your keywords are there in your content but in a way that makes sense. For example in this post, one of my targeted keywords is SEO over optimization but you don’t see me stuffing my post with that keyword. Just a few times in different forms, a couple times with hyphen and a couple times without embedded naturally in my content. That is good way of putting desired keywords in your content that is both user friendly and search engine friendly.
Offsite Over-optimization: This refer to building too unnatural inbound links growth. You want to make sure you make links in natural fashion. If too many links are made in short period of time, or if too many high quality links are made without having lower key links, or if there are too many links made under too few anchor texts, these are all some of few elements that can raise flags with Google.
Make sure you diversify on your inbound links with different anchor texts so it looks natural. For example if you are doing optimization for a client, let’s say a payday loan lender, then you want to make sure that is not your only keyword you are using. And do not send all links to your homepage. Send a few links with relevant anchor text to inside pages as well for example for the same site, I choose to send payday lender to an inside page with relevant content.
In summary, SEO over-optimization result of poor SEO strategy, and even experienced SEOs have tendency to make that mistake it probably because the get rushed to get faster results either by impatient client or employer. The key is not to give in to that and choose and define an effective SEO strategy that works. Explain things to your clients and your employers and educate them about possible consequence if SEO isn’t done properly. Trust me I know from practical experience!
One of good practices I think for user is to list out a list of your articles on your blogs. Users like it and I assume search engines should like it to. As a consultant, I tend to look online to find latest information on payday loans and the payday industry. I found a nice payday blog with good number of payday loan articles but great thing about is that they had listed them all out in form of an html page. As a payday loan SEO specialist, I was really impressed and I am sure that site should be ranking good for doing that or the very least should have happy users for making it easy to find articles without clicking on the back button over and over again. It’s just good practice all together I think.
One of my payday loan clients pay1day.com is struggling to maintain stable ranking. Their rankings change day to day and not by a few but many. On a keyword like payday advance, they can be on page 3 and next day on page 5 or 6.
The payday loan industry remains to be one of the toughest and most competitive fields when it comes to on-line presence so I must admit payday loan companies have it tough specially the new ones like my clients.
In my opinion they should not be discouraged by time heals things and newer vendors need time to improve their on-line presence.
Payday loans continue to boom in US due to the credit crunch and the bad economy. More people with jobs are now getting away from creditcards and taking payday advance loans. But before doing that, one must fully understand the industry and the pros and cons of taking a payday loan.
I found a couple of payday loan blogs that I thought they would be helpful for your:
Pay1Day Payday Loans Blog
The Payday Loan Blog