Hi everyone, thanks for submitting your great search engine optimization questions. I came up with a huge blog post with all answers, Hesham and I thought to break it into a 3 part post series so we can present it in a better way for the blog readers. So, in this post I am going to answer a few of these questions and we will publish 2 more posts to complete the SEO series in the coming days.
SEO answers
Let’s start answering these SEO questions:
→ Question #1
Will submitting an original article from my blog to community websites such as Blog Engage, SERPd or Blokube have any effect on my search engine rankings? What about the Duplicate content implications? → by Indrashish Ghosh
Answer:
Thanks Indrashish for being the first person up with a question!
By submitting your content (like blog posts or articles) to community websites, you are actually doing a few things to help your SEO. First off, it’s a great way to build valuable inbound links for your content. Trusted community websites can pass along really useful link juice to your content. Secondly, by submitting your content to community sites like that you are helping build trust and authoritative status for you, your site and your brand. People know my name and my company’s name because I submit my content to sites like that. If I stopped doing that (or had never started!), I may have missed out on opportunities like this one because people wouldn’t know about my brand.
As far as the duplicate content implications goes, in my experience as long as you are only posting snippets of your content (like the first paragraph) to other sites, than you
shouldn’t have anything to fear. There is a big difference between a well-respected content aggregator and a splog. Here is what Google has to say about duplicate content.
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→ Question #2
Hi. I’d like to ask if reverse SEO exists? Meaning you can “optimize” a site so that it falls rank position on Google, ie competitor sites. Thanks. → by Fitz
Answer:
Hi Fitz.
I’m not 100% sure as to what you are referring to. I’m a strictly white hat SEO practitioner and have never heard of “reverse SEO” before, but it sounds like it might be a black hat tactic. I would never recommend that a site owner do anything to artificially influence the search engines or manipulate the search results.
Thanks for stopping by!
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→ Question #3
Here are my questions:
- How do we optimize videos for search engines?
- What video sites should we focus on?
- How can we leverage videos to boost page rank for a vblog?
- Should I type up everything I will say?
→ by Ugochukwu U. Opara
Answer:
Good question Ugochukwu, and one that I get asked a lot.
* How do we optimize videos for search engines?
* One way to optimize videos for the search engines is to write a transcript of the video. Since the search spiders can’t watch you video to know what it is about, a transcript will let them know what it focuses on. You also want to optimize the title, video description and tags of your videos with relevant keywords so the search engines can pull your video to match related search queries. Next, you can post the video to your blog (something I do with my own video marketing) with a quick recap. Not only does this get your video in front of your readers, it also gives you another chance to optimize for targeted keywords. I would also suggest creating a video archive on your website with a unique page for each video (providing it doesn’t get too spammy). Lastly, to make all the above tips easier, try to create videos that focus on topics people are actually searching for!
** What video sites should we focus on?
** YouTube, Vimeo, MetaCafe, DailyMotion, SlideShare and any industry specific sites your target audience users.
*** How can we leverage videos to boost page rank for a vblog?
*** While PageRank is an important factor for SEO, it should no longer be a high priority concern for site owners. PageRank used to correspond to how well a site would rank the SERPs, but now it is only one out of thousands of factors. As Matt Cutts said in this blog post about PageRank, “while you may be happy to see that the Google Toolbar
shows a little more PageRank for a given page, it’s not as if that causes a change in search results…”
In my opinion, the goal of your video marketing should not be to increase PageRank, but to build trust, drive visitors and build brand awareness.
**** Should I type up everything I will say?
**** As I mentioned before, typing up your transcripts can be useful from an SEO standpoint.
Thanks for leaving a question! Hope this helps.
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→ Question #4
Search Engine Optimization is a very big and a time consuming process. But once done it builds a very good image for our website. I am more into e-commerce these days. But for me understanding the SEO process would take a while since I have just completed my masters in e-commerce and currently trying to get some practical experience from an SEO company. Please explain why Word Press and Joomla are important for this process. What exactly does Word Press and Joomla do? → by Gerry Evans
Answer:
Hi Gerry, thanks for taking the time to leave a comment today.
Joomla and WordPress are content management systems and popular platforms for building websites or launching a blog. While they do have various e-commerce plugins, they are not e-commerce platforms.
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→ Question #5
Hey Nick, I am not going to stay and watch 🙂 So ..here is my question!
I knew recently about the microdata format and how it’s used to tell search engines more specific information about the content of a page, so I spent a few days tweaking FamousBloggers.net to be able to publish reviews and give ratings to products, (hopefully Google will accept the site quickly when I submit it), I’ve used the schema that is recommended by Google.The question is, do you think adding microdata format enhance ranking even if keywords has high competition?
Thanks in advance! → by Hesham Zebida
Answer:
Hesham, I’m happy to answer your question and thank you again for setting up this SEO Q&A!
When the keywords you are targeting have high competition, many factors come into play. It’s hard to say if one thing is going to for sure enhance rankings because you can’t account for everything else working for and against you. You don’t know what your competitors are doing or how heavily each factor is being weighed by the search
engines.
Microdata is still a relatively new topic in the SEO world, and my thought is that it could help, but it’s too early to tell if it will have a major impact on where a site ranks. I found this blog post that called microdata a last-minute technical SEO tactic for sites to implement as a final push for 2011. You can always test it and see what happens, but I wouldn’t invest too heavily in it just yet until the results have been a little more proven
with time.
I’ll will keep my ear to the ground for any more information about microdata and pass it along to you as I find it.
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