Month: October 2012

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YouTube: More Time Watched, More Traffic

Excerpts from my latest article at Practical Ecommerce: “YouTube’s Time Watched Algorithm Update.”

In the past, YouTube measured a video’s popularity based on the number of clicks it received. Last Friday the video search giant changed its algorithm to take the time spent watching a video into account. As a result, ecommerce sites wanting to attract more viewers to their videos need to focus more than ever on creating video content that speaks to their audiences and holds their attention.

A snappy or controversial headline or an attractive thumbnail may get a lot of clicks, but if the content of the video doesn’t live up to viewers’ expectations, the “time watched” metrics will be poor and the video’s YouTube rankings will suffer.

The update measures actual minutes watched …

Read the full article at Practical Ecommerce >>

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Originally posted on Web PieRat.

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5 Favorite Free SEO Tools

Excerpts from my latest article at NBC Chicago’s Inc. Well: “Five Go-To SEO Tools You Should Use Immediately”

Search engine optimization is a discipline practiced by people halfway between creative marketing roles and technical developer roles. SEO folks need to understand and be able to communicate with both sides of an organization. These five SEO tools are my go-to sources for data to help me analyze sites and develop strategies that will meet the marketing and technical needs of my clients.

Details on each in the full post at NBC Chicago’s Inc. Well: “Five Go-To SEO Tools You Should Use Immediately.”
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Originally posted on Web PieRat.

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Deploying Your Keyword Army to Win Searches

Excerpts from my latest article at Practical eCommerce: “SEO: Marshaling Your Keyword Army.”

Content optimization for search engines seems straightforward. You research the keywords that your customers use most frequently and you use them on your site in the places that matter most to search engine algorithms. But deciding which keywords to apply to individual pages when you’re ready to optimize is a much greater challenge.

When faced with a set of pages, it’s tempting to optimize for the same keyword on multiple pages. After all, the more pages optimized for a keyword phrase the better chance of ranking well, right? The reality can be just the opposite.

If five pages on your site are optimized for a juicy keyword phrase, each page is competing with the others for dominance for that phrase. In a well-designed site each page has a unique purpose. That’s why it’s a separate page and not part of another page. And because each page has a unique purpose it will also have a unique ability to rank for specific keyword phrases.

Think of each page on your site as a soldier in your army. Each battle to win individual search results contributes to the greater glory of the army and organic search victory for your site against competitors. Each soldier has a specific task to do to help win the war….

Read the article in full at Practical eCommerce »

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Originally posted on Web PieRat.

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Accessorize Your SERPs for More Search Traffic

Excerpts from my latest article at NBC 5 Chicago’s Inc. Well: “How to Increase Your Search-Result Click-Throughs”

A lot of the focus in search-engine optimization concentrates on ranking for valuable keyword phrases. But are results for your pages that do rank in the search results visually optimized to drive click through to your site? Try these search-result optimization techniques to bring some bling to your search results this holiday season.

 

 

The sample search results from Google shown above are highlighted in red and green for a reason: The red boxes indicate items present in the search result thanks to what Google calls “rich snippets” and the green boxed items are simply updates to the title tag or meta description for that page. Taking advantage of these techniques can help your search result stand out from the crowd of 10 blue links to win the click, even if it isn’t ranked first in the search results.

Let’s cover rich snippets first. Many sites contain reviews or video or pricing information, but not all of them have these visual cues included in search results. The search engines rely on structured data in the HTML code of the webpage to identify the content that belongs in these rich snippets. If the content is already on the page, using a structured markup format like Microdata, Microformats or RDFa will alert the search engines that the marked up content should be considered for inclusion in a rich snippet. Keep in mind that optimizing for rich snippets won’t improve your rankings, they will only help you stand out when you already rank….

Details on each in the full post at NBC 5 Chicago’s Inc. Well >>

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Originally posted on Web PieRat.

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Smartphones, Tablets Account for 1 in 8 Visits

Excerpts from my latest article at Practical eCommerce: “Smartphones, Tablets Account for 1 in 8 Visits.”

One in eight pages accessed on the Internet in the U.S. today are viewed on mobile devices, according to a report by comScore. Mobile phones account for 9 percent of Internet visits and tablets make up another 4 percent. It begs the question: What sort of experience are those mobile users being served?

Mobile users are a demanding group. They want information tailored to their small screens that they can actually read and transact with, and they want it now. Strangeloop Networks provides optimization and web performance services for mainly enterprise-level companies. Its CEO, Jonathan Bixby, said, “The latest mobile user surveys tell us that two out of three mobile shoppers expect sites to load in four seconds or less.” Tablet users expect even greater load speed at three seconds per page.

Interestingly, when Strangeloop conducted a test of 200 leading ecommerce sites, not only did mobile load times over 4G networks fall short of expectations, but desktop load times did as well. In fact, desktop load times tested were a mere one second faster than Android smartphone load times over the same networks….

Read the article in full at Practical eCommerce »

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Originally posted on Web PieRat.