How to Use YouTube for SEO

You can improve your SEO by uploading videos to YouTube and including a link to your website. WhiteSharkMedia.com gives a few tips below how to best take advantage of this opportunity:

Titles and Tagging

YouTube can’t view and understand videos (yet), so it relies heavily on video titles and tags to index the content. Titles work similarly to Meta titles on regular web pages. You want to write them for the viewers not the search engine while sprinkling in the important keywords that you want your video to rank for.

Tags are a bit tricker, they are similar to the old Meta keywords on regular pages.The goal is to make relevant tags, quality over quantity, as you want your viewing time to be high and irrelevant tags bring irrelevant views. YouTube has this to say about viewing time:
“Watch Time is an important metric to promote videos on YouTube. The algorithm for suggesting videos includes prioritizing videos that lead to a longer overall viewing session over those that receive more clicks.”

High Quality Descriptions

Descriptions are often overlooked by SEOs since links within the description are NoFollow and pass no value. This however is a terrible mistake; video descriptions are a great place to further explain your video, provide social media links about yourself to the viewer, mention other videos that might be of value to the viewers, etc. Fill in your description and never underestimate the power of text on a YouTube video.

by Joe Seidler

Google+ My Business and Yelp Reviews – What to Tell Your Clients

It is important to have clients leave reviews of your service/product on Google+ My Business and/or Yelp. The more reviews you have, the more exposure you get on the web. This is very important… and yes, it’s worth the effort to encourage reviews. But as difficult as it may be to get clients to take the time to leave a review, there is another hurdle set up by Google and Yelp. And it’s best to inform your clients about it beforehand.

Google and Yelp try to avoid having people leave bogus reviews. For example, they don’t want a friend or family member to leave a false review. In order to try and minimize these issues, they each have their own requirements to leave a review.

Google+ My Business requires that you be logged into a Google account to leave a review. If you have a gmail account for example, you can log in (if you aren’t already) and then leave a review. If you do not have a Google account, they will ask you to create a Google+ account before you can leave your review. It’s free and will not cause any harm.

Yelp requires that you have a Yelp account (referred to as your profile) to leave a review. If you don’t already have one, it’s easy to create it. In order for your review to display on Yelp, you must have previously left at least one Yelp review. So it’s important to tell your client to begin leaving reviews on Yelp so they will all be visible and useful.

by Joe Seidler

Google Analytics Bad Referrals – Part I

Updated 7/1/15.
Starting in mid-2014, a few disreputable marketing companies (mostly outside the U.S.) began a practice of sending visitors to 
websites they didn’t ask to go to (including probably yours). Over the past year this has become a very big problem on the web because it makes it appear you are receiving more valid visitors than you really are in your Google Analytics data. This doesn’t hurt your website, but it makes it impossible to measure how your website SEO is doing. To see the “bad referrals” you are getting::

1. Log into your Google Analytics account.
2. On the menu on the left of the screen, go to Acquisition – All Traffic – Source/Medium.
3. In the list, you will likely see some of these entries which are distorting your data:

  • 100dollars-seo.com / referral
  • 4webmasters.org / referral
  • adviceforum.info / referral
  • aliexpress.com / referral
  • best-seo-offer.com / referral
  • best-seo-solution.com / referral
  • buttons-for-website.com / referral
  • buttons-for-your-website.com / referral
  • buy-cheap-online.info / referral
  • cheatdaddy.com / referral
  • cre8withluv.wix.com / referral
  • dailyrank.net / referral
  • darodar.com / referral
  • duckduckgo.com / referral
  • event-tracking.com / referral
  • fiverr.com / referral
  • free-share-buttons.com / referral
  • Get-Free-Traffic-Now.com / referral
  • googlsucks.com / referral
  • guardlink.org / referral
  • howtostopreferralspam.eu / referral
  • hulfingtonpost.com / referral
  • ilovevitaly.com / referral
  • kabbalah-red-bracelets.com / referral
  • live.yodle.com / referral
  • merchantcircle.com / referral
  • mozilla.org / referral
  • netplexity.net / referral
  • okcupid.com / referral
  • rankscanner.com / referral
  • sanjosestartups.com / referral
  • search.xfinity.com / referral
  • searchlock.com / referral
  • semalt.com / referral
  • semaltmedia.com / referral
  • simple-share-buttons.com / referral
  • sitevaluation.org / referral
  • smailik.org / referral
  • social-buttons.com / referral
  • sonicwall.com / referral
  • success-seo.com / referral
  • trafficmonetize.org / referral
  • urlopener.com / referral
  • videos-for-your-business.com / referral
  • webmonetizer.net / referral
  • websites-reviews.com / referral
  • weburlopener.com / referral
  • xtopoly.com / referral
  • youporn-forum.ga / referral
  • непереводимая.рф / referral

You can filter these bad referrals out by:
1. Click on the Admin tab at the top of the Google Analytics window.
2. Click on Tracking Info under the PROPERTY column.
3. Click on Referral Exclusion List.
4. Add each of the bad domains above (e.g., semalt.com, buttons-for-website.com, etc.)

(note: This only works if you are using the newest Universal Google Analytics tracking code. If you aren’t, it’s time to make the change by updating the Analytics tracking code on each page of your website.)

Happy to answer any questions.

by Joe Seidler