Creating a Video Sitemap

In this video blog we'll discuss how to create a video sitemap file so search engines can better understand your video content.  We'll also briefly discuss some other basic video SEO best practices.

A web consultant probably does not have to tell you that search engines are including more videos in their results than ever before. Articles such as this one in Tech Crunch explain the benefit and effectiveness of getting your videos optimized and appearing in Google's search engine result pages (SERPs)

Try searching for anyone famous, your favorite sport or drunken monkeys (see the video for an explanation) and chances are you will see videos returned near the top of the search engine result page (SERP).

There are less videos (10 billion approximately) than webpages on the Internet and many video producers are not providing Google with enough information about what the video contains in order to get them indexed nor are they optimizing the videos for search engines.

In addition, actual searches are tending to favor videos over traditional web copy which is resulting in greater click-through rates for video over web pages. Wouldn't you rather watch a video on drunken monkeys than reading about them?

When creating a video for a blog, your corporate website or social media campaign its important to add information about the video to a videositemap.xml file that Google can spider and index in order to help them understand the video’s content.

The video below explains how in less than an hour you can create a video sitemap and submit it to search engines like Google in order to increase the chances that the video will appear in the top positions of search engines.  The video also briefly discuss how to upload the video using SEO best practices.

Related Links:

• Creating a Video Sitemap (Google)
• Google Webmaster Tools
• Google Webmaster Help Forum – Sitemap
• Video Is Now a Must Have for SEOSearch Engine Land

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Optimize your Landing Page with Heat Maps

In my Overcoming HiPPO Feedback on Website Design blog and video I discussed how you can use the free heat map tool Feng-Gui to discover how people would scan a future webpage.

I am currently working with Ultimate Construction to design a landing page for a Google Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaign that we intend to run in San Diego County for keywords related to "kitchen remodeling" and discovered another great use of the heat mapping tool.

When we received back the initial design we felt that the landing page wasn't focused enough. It was very difficult to communicate back to the designer that the landing page wasn't focused enough and didn't assist in helping us determine where are attention was needed. I decided to run the design (which was provided in JPG format by the designer) through Feng-Gui.com and the tool did a great job of visually illustrating that the eye was being pulled all over the place and not neccasily on the most important part of the webpages (like the form submit button). Here's the screen shot.

I sent the heat map to the designer while explaining some of my concerns and offering additional recommendations like moving up the landing page (by removing the logo from the top), de-emphasizing main navigation, replacing one of the 3 pictures with an area where Ultimate Construction could list their unique selling points, etc.

The designer was able to take the heat map and feedback and produce a much more focused landing page. The heat map of the updated landing page showed (that after the prominent kitchen remodeling image in the top left section of the landing page) the visitor would focus on the "Get Free Quote" button, Other Kitchen Remodeling work Ultimate Construction has done and then back up to the main banner area with client's key messaging. The eye movements seem to "jump" less (the numbers are sequentially closer to each other) and are focused on the most important parts of the landing page which should result in a great number of form submissions, ("conversions"), for Ultimate Construction.  Here is a screen shot of the revised landing page although we made some additional improvements before launching the final landing page.

Note: The text in the creative comps was only used for illustrative purposes and does not represent the final text used on the landing pages. You can see the final landing page here. In addition, we highly recommend using Google Website Optimizer and reviewing your Google Analytics data to better understand how your landing page can be improved after it is launched.

Related Links:

• Yellow Pages ROI Template
• Lets Talk Landing Page from SEOMoz
• Landing Pages from Marketing Resources
• Landing Page Best Practices from Web Analytics World (webinar)
• Effective Landing Pages

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Predicting Return of Investment (ROI) of an Offline Marketing Program

I recently worked as a web consultant with Ultimate Construction, a San Diego based construction company that was interested in advertising in the two major Yellow Pages (produced by Verizon and AT&T) in the North County San Diego region but wanted to know if it was a good investment.

After talking to Verizon and AT&T's sales representatives and obtaining several figures (e.g. ad costs, expected number of leads, etc) and asking Ultimate Construction what are the companies average conversion rates (on leads and actual work estimates) we were able to clearly identify which company and ad size offered the highest value for his investment and which ones were completely unprofitable.

See the video and spreadsheet below for a quick explanation on how any small business can determine profitability of an offline marketing channel.  By using the spreadsheet template you can just plug in a couple of your companies metrics and some of additional advertiser metrics.

Related Links:

• Yellow Pages ROI Template
  

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Analytics and Search Engine Checklist for a New Website Launch

Prior to being launched, most websites go through a Quality Assurance (QA) process but rarely does this process address even the most basic Analytic or Search Engine issues that are affected by a website launch. When launching a new (or redesigned) website make sure you have at least addressed the following issues:

Website Analytics (note: urls are for illustrative purposes only and are not meant to work).

• Verify the website analytic code has been implemented on the new website.
• If your using Google Analytics its usually more effective to setup a new profile for the new website analytics (while retaining the old profile for the old website seperately).
• Redirect popular URLs of the old website to the most relevant new webpage.
• New or existing subdomains on your website. Example: http://xyz.rwebconsulting.com/.
• Popular landing/entry pages that are marketed offline or online. Example: http://www.rwebconsulting.com/email-campaign.
• Top 25 Entry Pages – Use your analytic reports to find the most popular entry pages on your website and setup redirects to the most relevant new webpage.
• Business Critical Landing Pages – Meet with product owners to determine any landing pages that they might be using in online/offline communications. Example: www.rwebconsulting.com/top-product.
• Other Domains Being Used. Example: www.rweb-consulting.net, etc.
• Analytic Setup – Verify you have configured and setup the following:
• Goals that are dependent on page urls, etc.
• Filters that are dependent on page urls, etc.
• Segments that are dependent on page urls, etc.
• Downloads, Flash or Outgoing links - Create "virtual page views" for document downloads, mail to links, audio files, social media links. For info on how to set this up in Google Analytics click here.
• Add appropriate GA code to 3rd party applications.
• If the 3rd party application is hosted elsewhere (example: the root domain is different) you will need to "pass" the GA cookies b/w domains. For info on how to setup this up for Google Analytics click here.
• If the 3rd party application is hosted on a server that has the same root domain add your default GA JS code to those applications and consider setting up a unique profile in GA to track usage of only that application. For info on how to set this up in Google Analytics click here.

Search Engines

• Increase local search engine visibility by adding your website to Google: http://www.google.com/local/add and Yahoo: http://local.yahoo.com/.
• Submit an XML sitemap (you can generate a free one at http://www.sitemapdoc.com/) to Google’s Webmaster Tools http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools and Yahoo’s Site Explorer http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/.
• Identify any webpages you don’t want indexed by uploading a Robots.txt file to the root directory of your website.
• Submit your website to free search engine directories.  Example: http://www.dmoz.org/.

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