SEO Tactics for Every Flavor: Mobile, Local, and Video Search

Today’s search landscape shifting beyond doing using SEO to optimize for your text-based websites for people doing searches on their desktop browser. In the era of search anywhere via mobile and where even your grandparents are sending you YouTube videos, it’s a changed landscape for SEO as well. Partnering with the SMX conference series, well known for covering the search marketing space, ad:tech hosted some great panelists on the topics of SEO for mobile, local and video search which introduced the audience to very actionable and tactical information you could implement right away.

MODERATOR:
Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, SearchEngineLand.com

PRESENTERS:
Cindy Krum, CEO, Rank-Mobile, LLC
Matt McGee, Assignment Editor, SearchEngineLand.com
Drew Hubbard, Senior Linking Analyst, SEO, The Search Agency

Cindy Krum on Mobile SEO
Cindy Krum kicked off the session by introducing the audience to SEO for mobile users. While traditional search engines like Google and Yahoo are available on phones,  marketers do need to tweak their SEO campaigns for to more specifically target the mobile user.

Different Search Engine Landscape
Unlike traditional search, mobile search can be divided into three areas:

• On Deck Search: They carrier’s own search engine, which is typically white-labeled versions of JumpTap and Medio. Their ranking mechanism relies not only on algorithms, but on submission by websites and payment.
• Off Deck Search: This is the traditional players we known: Google, Yahoo and MSN/Live. However, they do have their own mobile search algorithm, which can be different from the results seen on a computer
• In Mobile Apps: These are specific topical apps with search functionality, such as the Yelp iPhone app.

Krum stated that the focus on the presentation will be on “off deck” search, since that is has the widest growing use and also uses more traditional SEO tools to implement. She lists six basic guidelines in conducting SEO:

• Traditional & Local SEO Best Practices: A lot of traditional SEO best practices still apply to mobile SEO:1) no fancy flex, flash or ajax; and 2) make content relevent with carefully chosen keywords.
• Appropriate Site Architecture: 1) Avoid using dotMobi for your mobile website. It is bad for SEO and presents a poor experience for your users. 2) Designate ares on your website as mobile, such as m.website.com or website.com/m;
• Clean Code: Since ranking is half the battle in SEO, marketers need to also keep in mind that download speeds are still an issue with mobile users and to take care to use clean XHTML code is not only more readable by mobile browers but can be optimized for download speeds.
• Good Mobile Rendering & User Experience: Just like the early days of the Internet, there are many different types of web browsers for the hundreds of different mobile phones out there. Be sure to test to make sure the website renders well for major mobile browsers from Nokia’s Symbian browser to Opera Mini Browser.
• Mobile Site Map & Bot Instructions: Help guide search engines by using mobile sitemaps and robot.txt codes to direct which areas mobile search bots and traditional search bots shold crawl to, e.g. Google’s mobile bot should only crawl m.mysite.com not http://www.mysite.com.
• Appropriate Mobile Search Engine & Directory Submissions: Beyond submitting to Google, Yahoo and MSN/Live, there are carrier-specific search engines such as JumpTap: http://www.jumptap.com/content-publishers-submit-content. Krum included an entire page of other specific mobile websites from Sprint to Nokia.

Drew Hubbard on Video SEO
Drew Hubbard gave a great best-practices course on how to do Video SEO for both hosted-video websites, like YouTube and Vimeo, and self-hosted websites (vidoes hosted on your website). He listed out six very actionable points for optimizing both types of videos.

Six Best Practices for Video SEO

1. For now, we assume that video is invisible to search engines. Good, spiderable content is the key to good rankings Use the word “video” in titles and URLs: As in the screenshot above, Google cannot “see” a video. So for YouTube, for example, it relies on all the text that surrounds a vide: title of the video, description, synopsis, transcripts, tags, captions and subtitles. Currently, YouTube matches the title, description and tags you give a video uploaded to YouTube as its title, description and keywords. Also when hosting the video on your own website, make sure to make the name of the video file descriptive and not just something like MVI_1439.AVI.
2. Use the word “video” in titles and URLs: Sounds very simple, but is is an often forgotten fact.
3. Always carefully consider video thumbnails: Hubbard showed an example where an attractive looking thumbnail garned far more video views than a plain looking thumbnile of a tree, despite being of the same video.
4. Watermark your videos to protect branding: Videos uploaded on a single website frequently appear uploaded to another website by an independent person. While this person maybe well meaning in making the video more widely available, you can ensure that your branding and video’s origin is intact using watermarks.
5. Take advantage of video services’ tagging options in order to create keyword-rich content and meta data:
6. Allow others to interact with your videos: This can sound like a scary proposition, but the this allows you the leverage the viral-nature of the Internet. The more people can interact and share a video - your video - the better chance for the video to be able to spread virally online.
7. Include XML video sitemaps when appropriate: When hosting a video on your own website - and not on Vimeo, YouTube etc -  use an XML video sitemap so that search engines can more easily identify the file on your website as a video file.

Matt McGee on Local SEO
Matt McGee gave some great easy to understand best practice tips to ensuring a website is optimized for local search. McGee began by emphasizing that even in local search, Google still dominates. And that starting in March 2009, Google has been automatically applying a “local search algorithm” regardless if a searcher uses “flowers” or “flowers san francisco” search. Presumably, Google determines the location of the searched either from being signed on a Google Account (like Gmail) or via IP address data.

1. Separate page for each location: For search engines to understand the different locations your business may have, there needs to be a separete webpage for each of your locations that also clearly marks in plain HTML text the address of each of your business location.
2. Write a detailed Location/Directions page: To help reinforce the fact that your business is at a specific location, it is helpful to write a detail locations/direction page, which literally spells out the location of the business rather than simply show a graphical map.
3. Do regular SEO – page titles, link text, H1/H2 tags, etc.—but with geo modifiers: That’s easy enough. Instead of talking about “Joe’s Flowershop”, be descriptive and say “Joe’s Flowershop in San Jose.”
4. Standardize & Optimize Business Profiles: One of the ways Google, Yahoo and MSN/Live build understanding whether is a business is local is from looking at data from local directory listings. McGee recommends using websites like GetList.org.
5. Create & acquire citations:
6. Acquire/Encourage ratings and reviews: McGee made an interesting note that search engines do list the number of reviews a particular local business received (good or bad) from third-party websites. A potential customer is most likely inclined to click on the listing that mentions it has “203 customer reviews” rather than a business that only has “1 customer review”. see below.

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