Speakers:
Marshall Simmonds, Define Media Group
Rhea Drysdale, Outspoken Media
Summary
Marshall and Rhea provided cutting-edge strategies and tactics to maximize your exposure in non-traditional results like News, Images, Videos, Blogs, and Maps in this presentation at Search Fest 2012.
Marshall Simmonds
Nov. 2011 – Google releases freshness update which includes trusted resources almost immediately.
25% of queries were fresh results
Fast-forward to Feb. 2012 and 45% of queries included ‘fresh’ results
What to do about freshness?
- Blog about a topic. Blog often (editorial calendar)
- Include Time stamp
- +1 probably a strong signal
- Watch Timely queries – thinks people ARE searching for (queries, what’s hot, real time, trending) not necessarily historical data
- Pay attention to the <lastmod> in your SML sitemap
- RSS Feed – feedburner.com for you blog
What about video?
YouTube, YouTube, YouTube. You HAVE to be on YouTube to get into universal results
- Google looks at YouTube likes, shares, favorites, comments, embeds, title to decide relevancy
- Include the word “video” in your title
- Include transactional kw’s for eComerce
- KW rich description, can include transcription in description using transcriptionservice.com
- Use annotation and caption feature to add links (interlink if you have multiple videos)
- Pick the right category
- Tags- DON”T waste too much time but add some
- Open comments – but buyer beware (negative comments are okay too many positive comments look fishy).
- Distribute! Tell everyone about your video – social, video sitemap, RSS
Images
- 20% of all searches on google are image-related searches, not optimizing images is a missed opportunity (alt text, caption, image name)
- Create separate SML sitemap for images (SEO friendly images – WordPress Plugin)
Google+
- The big dogs (espn, npr) are paying attention, you should too, it’s early, build your circles, post relevant content (not necessarily yours)
Rel=author tag
- Users react to search results differently when they see an image (30%-400% increases in CTR have been seen)
Sitemaps (do them)
- XML, HTML, Image, Video, News, Blogs, Product
- Sitemaps increases indexed pages
Takeaway – pay attention to all digital assets and how you can leverage them.
Rhea Drysdale
News and Blogs
Where to start?
Get mentioned in a News Source
- Be visible to reporters (know people who know people) if you don’t, use HARO, MuckRack, JournalistsTweets.com, Google Alerts
- Be a resource – be visible during their research (aka Content Marketing)
- Be active in your industry
- Be crazy good at something
- News doesn’t have to be mainstream
Get Syndicated
- Make sure you’re getting syndicated the “right” way
- Press releases
- Be a news source
- First make sure your aren’t one already
- Become a google news publisher
Submit and manage your XML news sitemap
Takeaway – Don’t just cover the news, break it!
