Search Engine Optimization

[Kai Cheong]

Chipping in with my 2 cents here since I’m quite the Net/Facebook/Blog/Twitter/Google geek and was responsible for getting our company stuff online.

For a company which still doesn’t really have a website [we did buy a domain]… I think we’re doing pretty OK with our blog. But we do understand the value of having a ‘proper’ web presence, so we’re currently [finally!] working with a web designer to get things going. Unfortunately, even though I started with web design/HTML waaaay before I touched video, my web designing skills are still stuck in the ’90s web era.

In fact, our blog has helped propel us to the top few pages of the Google listing because the Google bot constantly crawls our blog and finds lots of new material. All this without spending any money on AdWords. The other neat thing is, Google crawls every new post and keywords from different posts can get mish-mashed together to get interesting results.

We also have our YouTube channel which we use to upload excerpts of recent works. We also embed these videos in our blog. I think among local production houses, our presence on YouTube is quite decent since we do make an effort to tag with relevant keywords and do short write-ups.

Though there’s a need to check back on our YouTube channel once in a while, since we do not disable comments [that feels a little archaic and ‘cold’]. There have been some really immature comments to some of our more controversial documentary videos – and I had to remove some which were potentially libelous. But other than that, it’s not been too tricky.

As Matt has mentioned, your current site utilizes quite a fair bit of image maps. If it’s possible, it would help to convert your site to something more text-based because then will the bots be able to crawl and index your site in more detail.

We also have a Flickr account where I upload production stills [nothing fancy, just stuff taken with my iPhone on set and tagged with our watermark]. I also upload the more prominent works onto Facebook and tag my cast and crew… this is more for fun and to keep in touch, than trying to fish for business.

Since I’m active on Twitter, I’ve also opened an account for the company… but haven’t found what direction to take company tweeting yet. Since that’s still new grounds for me [even though I have more than 4,700 personal tweets to my name!].

Kai
FCP Editor / Producer with Intuitive Films
https://kai-fcp-editor.blogspot.com
—
Now ‘LIVE’! Check Out The Intuitive Films Blog @ https://intuitive-films.blogspot.com
At Intuitive Films, We Create: TV Commercials, Documentaries, Corporate Videos and Feature Films
Visit us @ https://www.intuitivefilms.com
—
MacBook Pro 2.4GHz | 4GB RAM | FCP 5.1.4 | Mac OS X 10.5.7

8-Core Intel Mac Pro 2.26GHz | 8GB RAM | FCP 6.0.2 | Mac OS X 10.5.6 | 3.0TB CalDigit VR | 2 x 24″ Dell S2409W

[Kai Cheong]

Hi Matt, thanks for the heads up on the Google local listing. Just made one for ourselves – never knew there’s such a free service!

Learning something new every day at the Cow ;]

Kai
FCP Editor / Producer with Intuitive Films
https://kai-fcp-editor.blogspot.com
—
Now ‘LIVE’! Check Out The Intuitive Films Blog @ https://intuitive-films.blogspot.com
At Intuitive Films, We Create: TV Commercials, Documentaries, Corporate Videos and Feature Films
Visit us @ https://www.intuitivefilms.com
—
MacBook Pro 2.4GHz | 4GB RAM | FCP 5.1.4 | Mac OS X 10.5.7

8-Core Intel Mac Pro 2.26GHz | 8GB RAM | FCP 6.0.2 | Mac OS X 10.5.6 | 3.0TB CalDigit VR | 2 x 24″ Dell S2409W

[Mike Smith]

Google’s advice on this is available from https://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/11/googles-seo-starter-guide.html

Jakob Nielsen’s views are always worth considering. He has some tips on this at :
https://www.useit.com/alertbox/search-keywords.html

And there’s more decent stuff at :

https://www.webdesignerwall.com/general/seo-guide-for-designers/

https://econsultancy.com/blog/5034-a-journalists-guide-to-seo

[Bob Cole]

[Todd Terry] “I don’t really want to have to rely on putting our stuff on YouTube”

Hi Todd,

Have you looked at other services, like Vimeo? I think you can embed their service in your website.

As I understand it, one of the great values with using such a site is that videos will play much better, in general, from the big boys’ banks of servers than from the average web server. True/false?

Thanks Todd and everybody responding for the thread – this has lots of great advice.

Bob C

[Ron Lindeboom]

Yeah, you can post your stuff on YouTube and Vimeo, or you can upload your stuff a LOT bigger here — we offer embed service links also — and when someone searches on you, you will come up in a site full of working pros. Or you can go with the small videos for backyard movie creators.

Here is one of the trailers in our current trailers contest that just started a few days ago. You don’t see reels this size over at Vimeo…

Ron Lindeboom

[Todd Terry]

[Bob Cole] “Hi Todd, Have you looked at other services, like Vimeo?”

Yeah, Bob… I did briefly at one time.

You’re right, their videos play well. However, if your read their TOS they technically prohibit commercial/business videos. The gist of it was that Vimeo was for amateurs and individuals, and that for-profit businesses were welcome to explore any of the many fine paid video hosting sites that are available.

The exact verbage says “Vimeo exists to provide you with a space to showcase your creativity and share your life. As such, we do not allow you to upload videos that are commercial in nature…”

It is a little bit of a gray area, as they follow that with exceptions that “independent production companies… may show or promote the work they have created.”

However, that is immediately followed by “Businesses may not use Vimeo to externalize their hosting costs.”

That being said, though, I’ll say that I have seen a lot of commercial videos on Vimeo in the past… it seems that wedding videographers in particular like to park their stuff there.

Personally it’s a bit of a moot point though, as we are not interested in external hosting… we want the look and control that we get by hosting ourselves. But I think if one were to wish to do external hosting for one’s video, the VIDEO – REELS section of the COW would be a good place.

T2

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

[Chris Blair]

Ok…I’m going to respectfully disagree with many of the responses on this thread. We designed and created our website on our own about 3 years ago after tiring of the cost and lack of service from web designers and ad agencies. I knew next to nothing about web design except for creating a handful of personal pages for our family and friends. They mostly sucked, although the family thought they were great and for personal sites they were certainly better than most personal web sites.

I do have a lot of graphics and design experience so it wasn’t tough designing our site, and we had a lot of graphics and “looks” we carried over from the old site. However…once built, I’ve done next to nothing to optimize our search engine ranking. Within about six months, our site was on the first page if you searched our name….and it appeared on the bottom of the first page if you searched video production, design, graphics, audio production and a few other phrases along with words like Indiana, Southern Indiana, or Evansville.

Within 18 months, we’d moved to the middle of the first page searching almost anything related to our name or industry, and if you typed in a whole host of related services (that we provide) along with our general location, we were also on the first page. Now, after almost 3 years, we’re either the 2nd or 3rd name that comes up with most of those search phrases and combinations. We also are consistently the first or second company listed if you do a general search for our range of services in our area.

Again…I’ve done almost NONE of the things listed on this thread. The only exception is I did once submit our site and some key pages to one search engine service (a freebie) that was offerred as part of a switch to a new service with our ISP. But frankly, I’m not sure how much that changed things if any. We were already pretty high up when searched. Until recently, almost none of our pages were named, and some still aren’t. We have no keywords programmed into the HTML on the index page. I will say that our site is pretty well-written and does have a lot of descriptive phrases and key-words within the copy of the index and sub-pages. There’s also a fair amount of copy about a wide variety of things we do. About half of that copy carried over from our old site (same URL) which was NOT highly ranked, but was also not nearly as well-laid our or extensive as the current one.

I’m not trying to say that the advice given on here won’t help some…but I think a well-written and well-laid out web site is far more important in getting a high ranking than all the other stuff people recommend. Our previous site was always poorly ranked and it was done by an ad agency that specializes in web sites…yet they looked at us with a blank stare when we complained of our ranking. When we asked them if they could help us get the ranking up, they sent an email listing a lot of the things suggested in this thread. When we asked, “aren’t YOU supposed to do that stuff automatically?” Again…we got a blank stare and a curt “no.” So I did them myself…but they didn’t work. We still were invisible in most of the rankings and were next to impossible to find with searches.

From my understanding of crawlers or spiders in search engines, they read the web pages and then follow the links on the page to other pages, read them, follow links etc. So it would seem that a well-laid out, logical site would make a big difference in getting a higher ranking. I’ve also read many times that rankings are often based on the frequency, consistency and relevance of key phrases that are high up on a page’s copy. So again…in the absence of meaningful titles to pages (in the title bar), well-written copy that gets the subject matter right up top and the old “who, what, where, when & why” stuff up there would seemingly also get higher rankings than ambiguous, lingo-laden writing, which many, many web design companies seem to absolutely LOVE.

Anyway, for what it’s worth…we’ve done next to nothing, except for that 5 minutes of submitting a few pages to a free service offerred as part of a switch to a different tier of service from our ISP, and our rankings are consistently on the top of the first page when you search relevant terms (industry, location, services, equipment, etc.).

So to summarize…when we used a company that does almost nothing but websites, our site virtually didn’t show when searched, even after we did all the things they suggested (and many are listed in this thread). When we redesigned and rewrote our site, and made the layout, writing and link structure more logical, within a year, our ranking jumped. Within three years, we ranked very highly on almost anything related to our core services, name, and region. Surely that’s not just coincidence? Is it?

Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com

[Fernando Mol]

Well, Chris, your site is certainly full of nice text content. That’s in my experience the best way to succeed in the SEO world.

But I have to admire your boldness. Just because you had a bad experience with a web company doesn’t mean all the people posting here are just goofing around.

I agree with the fact most SEO tips are very speculative. But I don’t know how that advice can help Todd form preventing somebody landing in a no-menu page because Google indexed separately the frames on his site.

Again, good content is the King, but even a King needs to have a COW to get a glass of milk.

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

[Tim Wilson]

It’s worth pointing out again that Google explicitly ignores keyword metatags. As they say in the following video, “Not even a little.”

The rest of the story from googlewebmastercentral.com, here.

Note too: people say it can’t hurt anything to include them – yes it can. Google sees them, and downgrades your site. Seriously.

And not just Google:

1997 was the last year that the meta keywords tag enjoyed support among the majority of major crawlers out there (4 out of 7 – Excite, WebCrawler and Northern Light, also crawling the web that year, did not support it).

When new search engines emerged in 1998, such as Google and FAST, they didn’t support the tag. The reason was simple. By that time, search engines had learned that some webmasters would “stuff” the same word over and over into the meta keywords tag, as a way of trying to rank better. At the time, search engines didn’t rely so heavily on link analysis, so page stuffing like this was more effective. Alternatively, some site owners would insert words that they weren’t relevant for.

In July 2002, AltaVista dropped its support of the tag. That left Inktomi as the only major crawler still supporting it.

(I found this information on a link from the Google webmaster’s own page.)

To summarize again, why do search engines ignore the keyword meta, or, in Google’s case, actually downgrade your site for having them? Because they are considered spam. Spam is bad.

So you can use the keyword metatag to optimize for Inktomi, or you can roll the dice on being downgraded in Google. Yeah, there are other search engines besides Google — and Bing is hinting that they use keyword metas — but seriously man, how much time do you want to invest in torching your own Google results?

Okay then, what DOES Google want? They want you to do exactly what Chris does. See here, which is Google’s webmaster guidelines page. Lots of good stuff there that echoes Chris.

Yr pal,

Timmy

[Chris Blair]

Fernando Mol: But I have to admire your boldness. Just because you had a bad experience with a web company doesn’t mean all the people posting here are just goofing around.

I respect your opinion because you’ve helped me a time or two on the web design forum. Especially considering that (by anyone’s account) I’m no expert when it comes to site design and production.

But we’ve actually had many bad experiences with web design companies. We’re an ad agency in addition to being a post house…so we’ve helped some clients by reviewing the development and design of their sites, usually as a consultant after they’ve already initiated things.

Time and again these clients (not us mind you) would complain of the exact same problems that we experienced.

Companies that:

1. Push design over content and function. Often to the extent that navigation is at best confusing, at worse, downright maddening.

2. Insist on totally flash-based designs despite their incompatibility in many mobile applications.

3. Not take the design through to completion…with no assistance with the site technically or making sure it went live or correcting bad links or browser issues etc.

4. Not helping the client with designing the site to enhance their search engine ranking, and in most cases, never even mentioning search engines as being important for the success of the site.

5. Not properly setting up the client’s backend application for easy updating, and charging absolutely ridiculous fees ($200 and up) to do things that quite literally took them 5 minutes and half a dozen mouseclicks.

I’m sure there are many, talented, thorough and honest web designers around, especially right here on the Cow…but there are also many hacks misrepresenting or sugarcoating their skills to unsuspecting clients who trust these people with tens of thousands of dollars for web development. There is also a TON of misinformation about website setup, design, administration and especially use of video on sites, most notably using flash video.

It just bugs me to see so many people get bad advice about web stuff…not so much on here, but from companies that claim to be web experts.

The same myths get repeated over and over. As Tim points out, meta keywords haven’t been used by the major players for nearly a decade. And from what I’ve read, search engine algorithms have gotten so sophisticated that a lot of the optimization stuff that SEO companies push just isn’t relevant anymore.

I’ve visited and read dozens of SEO companies websites and many of their sites are filled with jargon and lingo that when broken down, is common sense. My favorite is the ones that push things like “keyword messaging.” Here’s how one company describes it:

The web site optimization team conducts content and competitive analysis to generate a keyword glossary. This glossary indicates the keyword concepts being used to find the kinds of content and solutions present on the company web site.

Well DUH! Translated, use words that describe your services and use them alot.

Here’s another:

XYZ company takes a holistic approach to SEO. It’s similar to a zone defense. We adjust a mix of tactics including content and code SEO, links, public relations, PPC and various online media according to the situation.

Huh? And I swear that paragraph makes more sense than anything else on a very long page describing their “holistic” approach to SEO.

I’m sure that SEO is valid for a big company that relies on its website for sales and revenue, but in my opinion for small service based companies, it’s just not necessary, relevant or cost effective.

Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com