Youtube and Search Engine Optimization?

YouTube has grown into an authority site. It gained its popularity as a public video sharing website. Uploading and sharing videos can be done conveniently on YouTube. But that's not the only thing that can be appreciated with YouTube. It can also be used as a medium to search engine optimization. 

Millions of people logged on everyday in search for videos that provide their current need. Be that instructional or informational in nature. As you all know, YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine! Of course Google is the first one. And also FYI, Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion. This gives birth to the Youtube SEO. 

How to do SEO on YouTube?

Youtube = Video SEO. Video SEO is an online marketing strategy for optimizing videos that elevates the search engine ranking of a website. As millions of people search for videos everyday, it makes sense to take this opportunity to advertise and promote websites to gain maximum traffic and exposure. Not only traffic, but also an opportunity for link building.

How do you actually promote your website and gain traffic on YouTube? How about the link building? On YouTube, you can upload a video with clickable links or watermarks using a software. The clickable link could be your website url. You could also put your website's logo on your videos. And imagine if this video went viral.

On the description of the video you could also put your website url. And when someone re-post the video on their own channel, websites, Facebook page, twitter and other social media sites, the title, description and tags are automatically included unless deleted by poster.

You could also post comments and video responses. There, you could put video links as responses and you can invite more viewers to your own. If you could also create your own video or at least could edit one, you can recommend your website at the beginning or at the end of the video for more information. 

Ideal for link building and SEO isn't it?

Worried about High Bounce Rate

I have 2 blogs. Blog 1 has 45% bounce rate! A good hallmark for my blog. Blog 2 however has 85% bounce rate. This means that my blog 2 is not doing a good job. And I am worried on how keep it down.

First of all what is Bounce Rate? This definition comes from Google Analytics.
" Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page."

High Bounce Rate could mean...

Mismatched keyword and content. I got some searches from a keyword that my blog does not have.I've checked on them and it actually got 100% bounce rate from the post and has an average time of 1 second.

Unclear navigation and crappy blog design. In this case,I think I don't have this error. My blog 2 loads faster and has a user friendly environment. When visitors get confused they tend to leave the website for good!


Technical Problems on blog. This is a free hosted blog, I never had experienced technical problems.

What should I do?

I am working on my blog now. I think I have problems with my keywords. I am gonna rework them.

Content is king? No it's traffic

Quality content is useless without quality traffic. Traffic bring in sales and leads and  quality traffic generates revenue for you. I have 3 blogs. Blog 1 has 2000 visitors a day, blog 2 has 50 visitors a day and blog 3 having 200 visitors a day. Which of the blog making me the most money? You might be thinking it is blog 1, but it is not. It is blog 3. You see, income depends on the quality of traffic and of course on the product that you are selling. So talking about traffic, I have listed my top 5 traffic sources. Here they are.

1. SEO and Search Engines
Majority of my traffic comes from Google. I ranked 1 on some sort of targeted  keywords and phrases which brings in 70% of my quality traffic. How did I do that? I build a lot of quality one- way link from related sites. My other blog also got 1000 pages. Do not just create 10-20 pages. It takes time to make a thousand pages but think about your blog as long term business.

2. Article Marketing
Write short articles related to your site and place keyword links on the resource box. That way you get strong backlink plus visitors who may click on the resource box. Now where to submit this articles? One of the best is Ezine Articles. It works for me. Just try it.

3. Pay Per Click Advertising
This might be expensive but it is the quickest way to get quality traffic. Google Adwords, for me, is expensive. If you don't like to use money then just skip this step.

4. Social Media Sites
Nothing new here. Facebook, Twitter, Linkdn etc. bring in traffic. I have make Facebook to its full potential in creating quality traffic. I created a fan page and it brings me huge traffic. Most of the traffics here were temporary but It will bring you leads overnight. Do not also forget the power of YouTube! Create videos and have it watermark with your link.

5. Email Marketing
I actually suck at this and I actually pay someone to do it for me. Collecting emails is such a pain. But I learn a tactic on how to do it. Give free reports with exchange of their email addresses. That way you get repeat visitors. You can bombard them any offers you want. And oh don't be a spammer. That would make them unsubscribe. Write in your email viral messages, detailed information and make it at least once a week. That way you are making some bond with them and they might recommend you to their friends or co-workers.

That's it.  That was my top 5 traffic sources. How about you? Am I missing something important here? Tell me. I am interested to learn =)

Choosing the Good Domain Name

Let us talk about how to choose a good domain name. But as you can see, this blog has no domain name. Maybe you will ask me why am I teaching you how to choose a good domain name when my blog doesn't have one. Okay guys, to tell you the truth I think I have no plan to buy a domain for PC Holics. And here are the reasons.

• I am poor, can't afford buy one.
• I am happy right now with this blog.
• If I buy a domain name, I want hosting too which I can't also afford the monthly bills
• This is a small blog, not a business blog. So I think it is reasonable not to acquire one.

Now that you know,  let us talk about choosing the good domain name for your business website. As long as you start a website, you will have to acquire a domain name specially if its for your business.

So what is a domain name? A domain name is the root part of the address that you type in your browser. Example is www.facebook.com, www.twitter.com etc. And what about the www.facebook.com/home.phpdfffh454545? - Those are now called pages of the address. 

Why Acquire a Domain Name

You need a domain name for the following reasons. It could be one of them.

• You have a business and you have a website.
• You have a niche blog where you earn money from selling ads and or eBooks etc.
• An organization, or any kind of group. Charity group etc.

You may want to consider these also in choosing a good domain name.

• A short name that is easy to spell and that people will remember after they have heard someone mention it on the radio or if they read about it two days ago.
• A name the is built from the nr 1 keyphrase your are targeting with SEO
• A name that does not conflict with trademarks or business names already in use in your target market (or you could lose your domain to a trademark holder)
• A name you want to live with for many years (a lot of your marketing is tied to the domain name)
• A name without hyphens if possible
• A .COM or country specific domain for your business
• A .ORG or country specific domain for your organization

Tips for your Business Website

• Branding is important to your business, so choose a domain name that is short and memorable. If you have long name for your business. Get a domain name with the short version of your business.
• Always acquire a .com or a specific country extension if most of your visitors are coming from a specific country. Example: .com.ph , .co.uk
• Do not use a domain name with hyphens. It would be difficult to remember. Thus, you are losing some potential customers. 
• If you wish to use.net or other extensions like .biz, make also a .com version of them and redirect them to your .net or .biz website. Users are most likely to type .com on the address bar. 

Links - Another Important Item in SEO

I am talking about links. Last post was about keywords which are definitely the most important item in SEO. Now why links are important? Having links is a part of the algorithm of the search engines. Even if you have perfectly chose your keywords without quality and quantity of links, your site will not be discovered and spidered by search engines. 

Two types of Links in SEO - Inbound and Outbound

Outbound links are links coming from your site and leading to other site while inbound links; sometimes called backlinks,  are links coming from external websites leading to your site. Backlinks are important because it is how the search engines measure the popularity of your site especially Google.Of course there are good and bad links.Good links are links coming from authority and legit sites. Bad links are links that came from link farms and other suspicious places. You can acquire backlinks by buying them but consider free methods of acquiring backlinks unless you aimed to rank on top of search engines.

Anchor Text

This is the most important item in backlink. Anchor text are the exact text where the link starts from. Example: Make Money Online. It is the keywords that you click and then it points to another site. 

Bad Practices to be avoided in Building Backlinks

Here are practices you should avoid in building backlinks to your website. Keep in mid that these bad practices will destroy your sites reputation on SEs and will get your site sandbox! 

•  do not purchase too many links - you can get your website sandbox if you purchase a thousand links in a day.
• avoid outbound links to bad sites. It will destroy your reputation on Search Engines because these sites are disliked by the SEs
• do not participate in exchanging links.There are three reasons why you should not do this. First is you are not sure how long will your link appear on other sites. Second, the context the link appears may have been changed by the site owner. It is suspicious if most of the links from your site are from link ecxhanges.
• always balance the ratio of inbound and outbound links.

Keywords - The most important item in SEO

are Keywords! Keywords are actually the strings you type when you make a search on search engine. So if your site is optimized with that keyword. Most likely, your site will appear on the search results. So it is really important that you optimize your site with keywords. Seems easy huh? But it is not.

Choosing the Right Keywords

The search engines are so much populated with millions of  websites. Maybe you can rank your site with one-word keywords but you cannot maintain your ranking because a large number of websites will replace your site. So using two-word or three-word keywords will be of much help. Here are the tips that I could share  in choosing right keywords. 

• choose keywords that are related to the contents of your site
• include also keywords that most people use on your site 
• use synonym keywords, often users use keywords as such but mean the same thing
• expand your main keyword by using keyword tools

You can use Google's keyword tool or the Website Keyword Suggestion Tool to look for keyword suggestions for your topic. There are two things you should remember in choosing keywords. The relevancy to your site and the number of searches a month. You may also want to take advantage of narrow searches.

Keyword Density

After choosing keywords, you must make your site keyword rich without keyword stuffing. The idea of the keyword density is that it is the measure of relevancy of your site. The recommended relevancy for 2-3 keywords is 3-7%  and 1-2% for minor keywords. You can check your keyword density using Keyword Density Checker.

Where to Put Keywords

• URL and File names
• Page Titles
• Headings
• Special places

Keywords in the URL, File names, Page Titles and Headings are more important than keywords inside the page. Your site may have same keyword density inside pages compared to your competitor but having the keywords in these sections is of large difference.

Understanding Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the most technical thing for every webmaster. This is so true because SEO helps in the promotion of websites and requires fair knowledge on basic HTML etc.Generally, we can describe SEO as activities that make a website search engine friendly, thus making the website rank in higher position on the search results of the search engine.

I am not a SEO expert. The reason why I want to blog about SEO is simple; to learn and master SEO. Upon reading some articles and ebooks about SEO, here is the basics that I've learn about SEO.

• Even if you do all the activities in SEO it does not automatically guarantee  you a high search engine ranking.
• Setting realistic goals like being the top 50 on a popular keyword is more satisfying than aiming for a ranking on the first page of the search engine.
• SEO can be a 30 minute job or can be a permanent activity. If you rank first on a keyword with low competition then I can say that SEO is only a 30 minute job. 

There's a lot more but I won't be posting them all. We will tackle that on later posts. What we are going to do now is to know how Search Engine works and the difference of the Search Engines. These are the fact about how the search engine work.

• Search Engine crawl websites using a software using a"crawler" or Google-bot as in the case of Google. 
• The spider follow all the links and index whatever they found on the way
• Spiders cannot spider every website everyday. Sometimes it will take a month so your SEO efforts won't be notice immediately. 
• Crawlers are not humans so they cannot see movies, flash, etc. They see only text based. You should use a spider simulator to check you website. 
• After crawling such pages, it will be indexed and will be stored on a database.
• Last step of the job of the search engine is to display the content on the browser from the most relevant to relevant websites and it is endless

Although most of the Search Engine's operation are the same, there are minor differences about them like:

• Yahoo tells the importance of websites by the on-page keyword factors
• Google tells the importance of your website by links
• Google loves older websites than newer ones while on Yahoo it is not a big deal

These facts may or may not change as time goes.Doing SEO is difficult these days than on way back 2003 and that what most webmaster says. It is easy to rank on the first page way back 2003  compared at present.

The one step SEO technique to improve your blog's traffic

Before I teach you how to do it, let us have lesson on SEO. There are two types of SEO. The "on page" optimization and the " off page" optimization.

On page optimization refers to the keywords on your post titles, header tags, title tags and etc. This way you have full control on how well your blog is optimized, especially on Google.

Off page optimization refers to techniques such as link building. The more links that is pointing to your site, the better your rankings on Google. The number of links pointing to your blog represents the importance of your blog om Google. Say for example blog A and blog B with the same niche. Blog A has 1000 links pointing on his blog and blog B has 500 links pointing on his blog as well. Who do you think will be shown on the first page on Google? In addition to off page optimization, it is not only the number of links that is important. The actual link text (anchor text with a link to your blog) is even more important. Example of an anchor text is this. Click Here  

So now you understand the difference between on page and off page SEO. But what we are going to do now is the on page optimization. We will change a little bit on your blog's template. Do you notice on Blogger, when you post, the Blog name is displayed before the post title. Google have it backwards so let us change it. 

1. Go to Blogger > Layout > Edit HTML

2.Search for this code in the template <title><data:blog.pageTitle/></title>. I


3. Replace that  code with the following code:
<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == &quot;index&quot;'>
<title><data:blog.title/></title>
<b:else/>
<title><data:blog.pageName/> | <data:blog.title/></title>
</b:if>


4. Save your template. And your done!

Here is how it will look after. Notice that the Blog name is now displayed after the post title.

All of your posts is now more optimized than before on Google. 

6 SEO Myths We Should Know About

Well, this is only a summary of what I've read from a forum. I hope I get it well delivered unto you.

1. Social bookmarking websites helps you get PR. (True if the site is do follow. False if it is no follow. No follow sites only help you in getting indexed faster.)

2. Using blackhat method will make your website sandbox. (True but you can always escape this. How? Get some backlinks on authority sites like Squidoo, Ezine Articles, Hub Pages..etc..then you can spend some time doing blackhat.)

3.Google don't know about my backlinks if they don’t appear when i search link: mysite.com. (False! Google does't show all links. Google only show links that give you great link juice. You can view all your links on Webmaster Tools.)


4. A blacklisted website can no longer recover. (False. Ask a re-review of your site as soon as you finished fixing it.)


5. My site is not indexed by Google, that means it is sandboxed! (False! Google have not discovered yet your site or have visited your site but not indexed as Google is not indexing every site it visits.) 


6. No Follow links are of no use. ( False,they are helpful if they contains your anchor text but of no use in seo if there is no anchor text although you may get some traffic.)