A Sensible SEO Strategy 3: Advanced Content

In my previous post on building a sensible SEO strategy, we talked about optimizing your website pages and blog posts, but what about all of that viral content we are creating, such as videos and free downloads? It makes sense to optimize this content for SEO as well since you have a great opportunity to attract search traffic and capture leads at the same time.

Videos

Most people upload videos to YouTube, so let's concentrate on that:

1. Title Text - Include your primary keyword or phrase in the title text (up to 99 characters). Make the title relevant and interesting. Grab their attention. The same rules apply for SEO strategy - try to find topics and keywords that appeal to your target market.
2. Description - You can be creative here, and you have plenty of room to be descriptive (up to 5,000 characters). Add your primary keyword or phrase to the first sentence. Focus on telling the visitor what your video is about and why they should view it. It's a good idea to ask for a positive rating, but be clever or funny about it. "This video will help a starving inbound marketing agency - please support us!" It's also a good practice to ask viewers to spread the word by sharing in social media or embedding your video in their blog posts. Encourage people to leave comments by asking questions or soliciting responses.
3. Tags - these are extremely important for getting found by YouTube users in addition to search engines. Make them match your strategic keywords for the video and include common tags for your target market. You can search YouTube to find these.
4. Settings - Make sure you allow public viewing, comments, video responses, ratings, embedding and syndication via feeds. These provide the best chance of viral spread, which in turn will produce the highest impact on search ranking for your keywords.
5. Promotion - Embed your video in a blog post, and optimize that post as you did in the video. Spread the word via social media, e-mail newsletters, press releases and anything else you can think of.

For more details on optimizing videos for SEO, here's an excellent article.

Downloads (Whitepapers etc. in PDF format)

1. Editor - Assuming you have a compatible PDF editor, such as Adobe Acrobat, go to File > Properties > Description.
2. Title - Add a keyword-rich title. This is important, since your PDF will its file name as the title unless otherwise updated. 
3. Subject - this is the equivalent of a meta description field in a web page or blog post. Describe your document, include strategic keywords near the beginning. Limit your subject to about 90 characters.
4. Keywords - Use your primary keyword and secondary keyword or phrase. Keep your list short (no more than 4-5) and relevant to the subject of the download.
5. Additional Metadata - By clicking this button, you can expand on the Title, Description (Subject) and Keywords, but keep your meta title and description short and keyword rich. The program will automatically include your title and subject in these fields, so you may not need to update them.
6. Backlinking - Don't forget to include links to your website, especially landing pages where you can convert visitors to leads. As your content spreads you can gain SEO juice from inbound links and capture leads at the same time.

Here's a helpful article on optimizing PDF's, including tips for page layout and other properties that enhance visibility.

Other Advanced Content

The same strategies apply for press releases, newsletters, webinars and any other content you publish online. Investigate the options for updating properties such as title and descriptions and optimize them with relevant, strategic keywords. As you publish more advanced content, you will see the benefits from both keyword and page rankings. For best results, publish great content that appeals to your target market, and you will reap the rewards.

Need help with your SEO strategy? Contact us to schedule a comprehensive SEO workshop.

Photo credit: mbtrama