Search Engine Optimization

[Jason Jenkins]

Hi Todd,

I’m no expert, but I have a few ideas that will help. YouTube. Get a YouTube account and upload your work there. Write keyword rich descriptions including the url to link back to your website. Adding a blog to your site can give the search engines more good material to “read”. You can embed the YouTube videos there along with interesting notes about the production process. The nice thing about YouTube is the tools they have for tracking views. You can easily go in and see how many views of a given video have come from your blog. Of course adding your work to the Cow’s demo section is great too––more opportunity for keyword rich descriptions. Trading links with your ad agency clients is another way to improve SEO. The more links other sites have to yours, the better. In my experience, there is not any one thing you can do to make a huge difference––it requires a bunch of little things all working together.

Jason Jenkins
Flowmotion Media
Video production… with style!

[Todd Terry]

Yeah, I hear ya Jason… and it makes sense.

It’s just tough though, as that’s not really the way I’d like to see this work. I don’t really want to have to rely on putting our stuff on YouTube. For watching our pieces our own self-hosting should be more than sufficient, and we can control its exact look and presentation. And no disrespect to them, but I think that portfolios etc. that reside on YouTube just make the operation just look a tad, well… cheap. A bit illegit. And I can’t think of anything I’d remotely want to blog about… or expect people to read. I sure don’t want to come across as one of those blog-happy people that think they are so interesting that other people need to read about the minutiae of their day…ha. I know far too many people like that.

I really can’t imagine any of our clients wanting to link to us either. They don’t have links to any of their other vendors, and I can’t think of any reason to convince them it’d be something they would want or need.

I see several other production companies in our area (none as nearly prominent in the area as we are, or prolific) who pop right up high on searches…. without any external links or blogs or YouTubiness.

There’s got to be a way…. grrrrr.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Jason Jenkins]

Have you done the free Google business listing?

Jason Jenkins
Flowmotion Media
Video production… with style!

[Todd Terry]

No, J2, we haven’t done bupkus…. yet.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Ryan Mast]

Todd —

I don’t think that you’ll lose any respect or professionalism by posting your videos on YouTube in addition to hosting them on your own site. For a free service, their quality is respectable, and it’s now a familiar user interface to a web audience — viewers will immediately know how to share/favorite/embed the YouTube version. Plus, if it’s on YouTube, it’ll be searchable by YouTube and Google.

Start by getting rid of the frames-based layout. It can hurt search engine crawlability:
https://searchenginewatch.com/2167901

There’s some other basic things you can do, like properly alt-tagging photos, eliminating Flash as much as possible, making a blog with useful content, placing your address and phone number on your home page, etc. It might be worthwhile to get a pro to help you with it, but there’s no guaranteed magic bullet to search engine rankings. Any SEO company who tells you that they can absolutely get you on the first page of a Google search is likely a weasel…

If you’re interested, Tood, I can send you contact info for a couple of SEO companies I’ve worked with.

[Fernando Mol]

A few SEO tips I think can help you:

-Use meaningful document names (instead of about.htm use about_myCompany_in_myPlace.htm)

-Use meaningful document titles. Leave your company name at the end of each title and add your keywords at the beginning.

-Create landing pages. If you are interested in attract clients who want commercials in your zone, one of your pages should target those words. Two or tree for page. For a different target, create a different page. Repeat the keywords in your content, but keeping them meaningful.

-Use semantic HTML. Actual web standards look for clean code. All of your styles should be made with CSS, leaving a clean HTML code for the spiders to read. Avoid, if you can, Table layouts.

-The Youtube and external links advice is great, but it’s used for SEO campaigns. If I got you right, you just want to improve your actual siteto be make it more “searchable”. To achieve that, the best rule is to have great content. Text content. Meaningful content.

I hope this helps

*Always share a link to your site and rate the posts. This is a free service for you and for us.

[Matt Townley]

I am certainly not an expert in this area, but I have had quite a bit of luck over the past two years getting my site to rank well in search engines.

I am sure some of what I have to say is completely wrong, but this is just based on my experiences. I would be curious to learn form others as well.

First, as others suggested, create a (free) listing on Google Local (https://local.google.com/). This will provide immediate help. This tells Google your business exists and gives them detail about you. When people do searches on google, local business results get favored well, so you want to be here. Most other major search engines have similar services, so submit your info to both of them. This alone should help a lot, or at least does in most cases.

Secondly, I noticed a few things about your website.
– The overall construction is built with frames and tables. Bots don’t like these as it confuses them. Using CSS based layouts and styles will separate your content from your styling and layout and makes your site easier to index and organize for search engines.

– A lot of your titles/headers are images, which makes it difficult for bots to understand your content, thus possibly ranking your content lower. Using text for titles and headers and using appropriate H1,H2, etc tags can make it easier for bots to organize and rank your content.

Also, submit an XML site maps to each of the major search engines. Google offers Google Webmaster Tools (https://www.google.com/webmasters/) which helps you manage your site’s relationship with them. You can make this yourself or there are tools out there that can generate them for you (coffeecup software makes one of them, but I’m sure there are others). This tells the search engines what pages exist and help them crawl them faster. It also gives you stats for crawling and indexing.

Having good, unique and appropriate titles for every page in your site is also important. Supposedly, meta keywords don’t matter, but I still keep them up anyways…just in case. 🙂

And of course, the more traffic you get to your site, the higher your site will be ranked in most search engines. This is the big catch 22, because it’s hard to increase traffic without having high search rankings, but if you get creative it will happen in time. It’s taken me almost 2 years, and now I rank in the top 3 results for almost all of my target keywords for my geographic region.

It’s a continual process that will constantly get better if you keep working at it. Results won’t happen overnight.

###
Matt Townley
MST Productions
[Media Services/Duplication/Replication]
http://www.mstproductions.com

[Ron Lindeboom]

[Todd Terry] “Google AdWords?”

In your situation, you could find yourself paying for every use of the word “commercials” if you are not careful.

I know people that use Google AdWords quite successfully, but the more obscure the word, the higher the chance your buy will be effective.

Ron Lindeboom

[Matt Smith]

I have been doing search engine optimization for the last few years and have had some great success with a wide variety of keywords. I believe that for most companies having a web presence will be vital to your success in the future. Every day more and more people are getting online to research companies and products, will that person researching your services see your company or will they see your competitor? Either way you can not afford to miss out on a client because you don’t want to do anything online. Forrester (research company) said that seo spending is set to increase 2x in the next 4 years. I mainly say this because seo and the web are not going anywhere and if you do not have a web presence you will miss out in the next few years.

Here is a brief overview and guide to the SEO process
First thing is first you need to decide on a few “keywords” for your overall seo project. This keyword selection is the most important step in the whole seo process. You will build your entire search engine optimization efforts based on this specific keyword so choose a good one. A keyword is simply what someone might type into Google’s search engine to find your company. So think hard about this, if you were looking for your company and the services you offered what would you search for? Once you have thought of a good keyword go ahead and type it into Google and you will get a good look at the competition. If you see some of your competitors there than you know you found the right keyword. If not that is ok too, many small business don’t use online marketing yet (actually 55% of small businesses don’t have a web site). Anyways now that you have a keyword you have to do some keyword research. You are going to go to https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal?defaultView=2
from there type in the keywords you think are good. This little web app will tell you approximately how many searches that keyword gets per month. If the keyword you selected gets 10-2000 hits per month you will have a lot less competition from seo’s. Thus making it a good keyword for you to optimize for.

Now that you have a keyword selected you will begin the seo process for that specific keyword or set of keywords. When performing seo you will only work on a couple keywords at a time or Google may think you are up to no good. You want your seo efforts to look as natural as possible. You now need to begin whats called the backlink building process. This is simply getting other websites on the internet to link to your webpage with the keyword you chose as the anchor text. For instance on many popular forums they allow you to create a link in your signature. You could create a link to your website in your signature, thus creating your first backlink. As you create more and more backlinks through forums, article writing, directories and more you will raise your web site in the search engine results page (SERPS).

Google Adwords

Google adwords can be a great way to test a keyword right away without actually performing any seo. To determine how much a keyword will cost to advertise with simply use that tool handy link on this page. That keyword checker will also tell you the approximate ppc cost of a specific keyword. All you need to do then is set up a adwords account and write a ad and you can begin advertising. I can provide you with a lot more detail and information if you would like. Message me.

I am sorry this does not cover all aspects of seo but I am happy to write a longer article or post if someone wants to learn. Or message me and I will help in any way possible.

[Mike Cohen]

Here are some things we have learned with a nod to your site:

Don’t use images for navigation. Your main navigation is images, and your contact info is an image. So when you google “Huntsville video production”, there is no text on your site that says Huntsville, so your likelihood of a high result is lower. You should never have to click more than once to find the address and phone number of a business. (our site requires one click – we are working on a major redesign as we speak).

If I then click Maps, you are the 5th listing on there, so that’s good.

As someone else pointed out, have page titles. All of your page titles are:

Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.

Better would be:

Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc. – Portfolio

or lose the company name after the home page and go with:

Portfolio – View TV Commercials

Look at Creative COW’s home page. The title is not simply Creative COW. Rather it is Creative COW: Creative Communities of the World.

Be descriptive – Google likes descriptive.

As for posting to YouTube and elsewhere, it doesn’t hurt. Here are my 2009 link referrals in site visits:

YouTube: 280
Creative COW Magazine Article on Surgical Video Production: 150
Facebook: 112
Creative COW forums/blog: 150
Creative COW Services: 15

It should be no surprise now that I spend a lot of time on this website – it is good for business.

Finally, have compelling content – be it a blog about what you do – or descriptive text about your services – the more relevant text the better for you because the more likely Google is to spend time indexing your site and the more likely you are to have content that people are looking for.

Granted our site is also a catalog of products, but there have been over 20,000 different keyword searches this year taking people to our site. Why? We have a lot of words. But we have words that people are looking for.

And we are adding new words all the time. Know of another site that is adding lots of words to its content all the time? Creative COW, that’s who!

If you do AdWords, as Ron cautioned, choose your words carefully. See which words result in a hit via organic Googling. No need to pay for what you can get for free. But if there is a word that has a lot of competition, you may consider paying for it. And then of course you need to see if you are getting a return on your investment – but AdWords is a marketing expense for most people.

We also do e-marketing using Constant Contact. We send our past customers timely email updates for our latest relevant products and services. And we do so in a polite way – no more than one message per time period to any mailing list. We get few opt-outs, because these are current customers, and we actually get some business.

Of course if you don’t have such a list of leads, then you need to get people to sign up for your mailings, and seek out people in the community to sign up for your list. That can be part of your selling process.

If you place videos on your website, use a video site map – this associates key words with your videos so they show up in searches. i think. We are investigating how this works.

Mike Cohen