No Show Without SEO
Still no arrival of the Penguin, boys and girls. There was a SMX conference last week where Gary Illyes was presenting. In reference to Penguin, he stated that he wasn’t willing to offer a further date for Penguin as he’d been wrong on every other occasion. If the spokesman for Google is unsure, what hope do we mere mortals have of predicting a release date?
SEO Site Reviews
I want to talk site reviews this week. I had an interesting request for one this week, which I thought would make an interesting example. By the way, if you have a site review request, simply shoot it through and I’ll do my best to take a look. So, this particular site review was from no other than a Dean Martin impersonator from that most showbiz of cities, Las Vegas.
Now I set about reviewing the site and, call me old fashioned, but the first phrase you’d probably want to rank for is ‘Dean Martin Impersonator’. Funnily enough, that search phrase was nowhere to be found on the site. I did find it in a page title as ‘Dean Martin Tribute’ though. Regardless of the phrase you aim to rank for on your site, you need to have your main phrase at the very start of your page title. Then you also need it in your heading tag.
Video Evidence
The site did have a great video embedded, so I went about searching for ‘Dean Martin Impersonator’ to see the state of affairs. Google returned with two videos at the top of the search results, both with the search term ‘Dean Martin Impersonator’. Now the reason that Google displayed two videos at the head of the results is that Google knows that from previous searches, searchers will ultimately end up viewing a video on that topic, so it is basically trying to save you time.
Now as good as this site’s video is, it has a lowly rank. When I checked, the video was optimised for ‘Dean Martin Live’. The link was fine and ‘Dean Martin’ was mentioned twice, along with one ‘Dean Martin Impersonator’. The reason that the rival videos were ranking higher is that Google thinks the other videos are more relevant for that particular search phrase as they had their main ‘Dean Martin’ phrase in both the video title and the video description. My ‘Dean Martin’ site didn’t have it at the start of its title, hence the lower rankings.
How Do You Fix That?
There are simple and effective ways to optimise your video content. Go to your video settings in YouTube and alter the misfiring title tags by adding your main phrase at the beginning. The other important item to check off is adding social links to your video, such as Google Plus and Twitter links. Do those simple tweaks and the rankings should improve greatly.
This particular site wasn’t even ranking in the top 100 search results for ‘Dean Martin Impersonator’. Each of the top ranked sites had the ‘Dean Martin Impersonator’ phrase at the start of the page title. That’s what needs to be on the homepage title, then change the name of the video and insert links back to your main site. Although the site was fundamentally clean, there were far too many instances of duplicated page titles. All your page titles need to be unique for healthy rankings.
Drop us a line if you wish to have me review your site, and please let us know if you find any Penguins!
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
