When not to post a video YouTube, Should you transcribe your video or podcast? - Unknown Secrets of SEO E-Webstyle Number 20

Good morning, and welcome to the Unknown Secrets of SEO eWebStyle podcast. Did I get that right? Yeah. Hey, guys. Welcome back to the podcast. Thanks for joining in. My name is Chris Burris, owner of eWebStyle. And this is Paul Hanson. I'm the sales manager of eWebStyle. Usually, we cover what we did on the last podcast. What did we do last podcast? Oh, I'll tell you what. Go back and listen to the last podcast and pop us an email and we'll include it in this podcast. I'm looking through my notes and I'm like, uh, Chastity Bono. We did shouts out to the guys who sent us emails and then there's a big blank. Did we do Costa Rica last week? I don't know. I can't remember. Anyway, we did a really nice podcast on Costa Rica a while back, so you guys should go check that out. If you've got an email to send us, keep those emails coming. We're getting some good responses. We're getting some interesting responses. We probably told this story, but I've been telling it to all sorts of people. So, uh, we got a call from Costa Rica wanting some search engine optimization services and we're really excited. Uh, we haven't done anything to target Costa Rica. And of course, actually, Paul was telling me about this and I'm like, so Paul, how, how did this, how did this guy find us? And Paul said, that's an interesting question. Let me explain it. And what was the, what did it turn out to be? Through the podcast. He, a buddy of his, found us through the podcast and he recommended us and he filled out our five point SEO analysis form. All right, I got a bud in here. You know, we always talk about yes and, right? This time the story's got to be right. You asked him, how did you find us? And his response was, some guys in Switzerland recommended you. Oh yeah. Yeah. There you go. And we're like, great. Cause we don't market in Switzerland either.

So we definitely, uh, we're excited that we've, we're an international podcast. You can tell your friends, uh, uh, if you listen to the podcast to educate yourself on search engine optimization, you can tell that you're learning from international teachers. Globally known. We are world class experts at what we do. And, uh, and we're happy to give back to the community. Do we update the forum? We've got to update the forum. I think we do. I know our designer did. I don't know if that's live yet. So, uh, so that'll be live. He made the point that our forum was designed for, uh, companies and individuals inside the United States. And so we need to expand our forum to include, you know, different countries. And, and so that should be up and live shortly. So, um, yeah, that's pretty exciting. Uh, we also got, we'll be answering in this podcast, uh, a note from a John Pavlakaus. Pavlakaus. It works for me. Hopefully I'm, hopefully I'm saying that correctly. Um, but we'll get to that in just a minute. News for today. It was kind of a slow news. There wasn't much going on in the news. Yeah. So, uh, there was an article. I was really excited about it. It said, you know, what are the benefits of marrying into Google? And apparently one of the co-owners is married to some, to his wife. And, uh, she, uh, she owns a company and Google is investing more and more money in her company. Yeah. Not so interesting. How about this? Who cares? Yeah. Yeah. I got a new story. I got a headache. And I have the solution. Lots of water. Lots of, lots of water. And maybe, uh, you know, I wasn't going to say anything, but maybe you should take a shower. Yeah. You know, I, I, I put it out there. Guess what, guys? Paul didn't take a shower. I don't, I'm, I'm, I'm proud of that. I'm here. They cut off the water in my neighborhood and I'm here giving you

guys what you want and I'm stanky. I didn't get to take a shower, but I'm here. I'm, I'm recording the podcast. Got a headache. So picture this, uh, Paul over there, stanky, Chris with the, um, clothespin on his nose. Yeah. Yeah. But we're, we're here. We're dedicated to keep, to keep giving you guys what you want. All right, Paul, so I got to ask you, the new iPhone is coming out shortly. What are your thoughts? Uh, what can they do to it this time? I mean, it's got 3G, it's got, what else can you, what else can you do? Will it do homework? Uh, will it, you know, will it drive my car? Does it drive for me? Yeah. What else can this sucker do? Well, you know, there, there are a few complaints with the iPhone and one of them is that you're unable to like highlight something, copy it, take it to another application and paste it. I don't know if they're going to include that upgrade. You would have thought they would have included it in the second upgrade, but they, they're not. And I think that probably I'm coming from a programming background. Uh, I think that probably has to do with not wanting applications running in the background, multiple applications. If you imagine that clipboard, if you will, is an application that's in the background. And so as soon as you add a clipboard, you've got an application that's also running in addition to whatever you're doing. So some of the, the things that make the iPhone quick are the fact that there aren't very many applications running in the background. Um, I think this is what I've read. If, uh, if you want to correct me on that, please do. Uh, we'd love to hear from you. You can get, you can reach us at podcast at e hyphen web style.com. Uh, send us those notes and, uh, Oh wait, I know, I know what's different. This iPhone doesn't have baby shaker on it. That's a callback. That's awesome.

For those of you who, uh, are wondering why we're laughing about baby shaking, uh, go back and listen to a previous podcast. Uh, cause we, we cover, uh, yeah, we cover baby shaking, you know, it's, uh, it's, it's a tradition in apparently both of our families and we're just going to keep it moving forward. Pay it forward, if you will. So, um, what's on the agenda for today? Well, we're probably going to ask, but I know the answer. I mean, I ask every time, but I'm like, I already know what's on the agenda. Okay. But anyway, what are we covering today? So what we want to cover, well, we want to start off and answer, uh, answer John. And I'm going to try this again, Pavlakos, Pavlakos, Pavlakos. We'll try, we'll go with that. Uh, it sounds Greek to me. Um, I'm going to agree with that. Yeah. And he asked a question. He says, uh, and by the way, he gives us a great compliment, very informative podcast, all content and no ego, man. You know, have you ever heard of, uh, there's a, there's a phrase in, in like human behavior expert, which is, uh, expectation, setting expectation. So yeah, you just set the expectation, right? You definitely did with that one. We can't have any ego anymore. I was, we were building up. We were figuring at the 25th podcast, we're going to bust out our egos and it's going to be all ego and no content. All right, John, you, you're, now we can't do that. So actually we appreciate that. That's a, that's a really great compliment. Uh, you know, we are doing this of course to promote our business. That's very important. Uh, but we're also doing this to give back, you know, SEO community has given us a lot. Uh, there's a lot of information out there and, uh, I'll be covering that here in just a second and we're really happy to give back. So, um, keep those comments coming and thanks again very much, John. Um,

he, he actually kind of said something bad about other podcasters, so we're not going to mention that. If you're really interested in it, you can actually go to our blog and you can look for John's comment. His comment is going to be, um, let me see what, uh, it is going to be on our 15th podcast. We're now working on the 19th, so we're about three, four weeks behind, uh, in getting these posted. Um, he's got a question, question regarding posting videos. Uh, they're very capable of posting videos on servers. Uh, do we post videos on a major video sharing site for marketing? Does it make more sense SEO to embed the videos from YouTube or to use them from their site? Um, John, and only because you made the no ego comment, I got to tell you, I did not know the answer to this. Uh, I certainly have my opinion. I had my opinion before I did any research. Uh, and I spent, uh, you know, my spare time this week kind of researching this. We don't do much with videos here. Uh, it's certainly something that we're aware has significant value. Uh, one of the websites we're working on, patrickwanis.com, does have videos. Those are all posted on YouTube. We, we typically don't embed, but that wasn't necessarily a decision. It was actually because we were doing videos really before YouTube came out. So we just continued to do it the way we were doing it. And then we realized the advantage of, you know, getting content onto YouTube. So, uh, one of the first points to make is that if you have videos, I think they should be on YouTube. Again, this is my thoughts. I don't have any, um, history behind this or much practice with it other than Patrick. Um, but, uh, YouTube is another venue to get more traffic. Um, and, and if you think about it, where do you typically end up looking at a video? Uh, if you've got some spare time and you want to

look at video, where do you go? YouTube. Yeah. I love YouTube. I have an iGoogle homepage and you, one of the applications on it is YouTube. I, I'm there all the time and remember that MC Hammer dance video? Oh, yeah. That was hilarious. Yeah. I spent, I like, I love YouTube. I spent a lot of time on YouTube. Uh, so it's a great way to learn. What was that called? Hammer Pants or something? It was like, uh, Hammer Pants dance video in LA. If you guys have like two or three minutes to kill, look up Hammer Pants dance in LA. It was a bunch of people who, who danced a, you remember the MC Hammer can't touch this video? They did the dance from that video and it must've been about 40 people. It was hilarious. And they did it in a store. In a clothing store. In a regular clothing store. Live on Sunset, I believe is the store. The store is called Live and it's on Sunset Boulevard, I think. It's actually a cool video. Yeah. I thought it was really cool. That was awesome. Um, so, so yes, you find videos on YouTube. I actually, I've been a member of StumbleUpon for a while. I'm not like active in the community or anything. I just really appreciate the, the software and, um, the value that it brings. So, typically while I'm eating lunch at my desk, uh, if I don't, if I'm not out, um, I'll, I'll just start clicking StumbleUpon. And for those of you who don't know, StumbleUpon is a, is a, is a, it's a really nice website. You create, you create, create an account, um, and you create, um, like a profile about videos or, not videos, but, uh, web pages that you'd like to see. In my case, you know, it's going to be stuff on SEO, stuff on programming, stuff on human behavior or psychology. I like all of that stuff. And so, I'm just clicking the StumbleUpon button and it just comes up to the

next thing, uh, that's in its database that's relative to my profile that other people in StumbleUpon have liked. So, if a lot of people have liked it, I'm more likely to see it. It's actually, uh, it's really good. And last night, I found StumbleUpon video. So, you can just kind of randomly hit videos, which is, which is also pretty cool. And then you can put your comments, you can say you like it or, uh, or forward it to a friend. Like, I forwarded one to, to Rob, one of our business partners here. Uh, cause it's, uh, he's a big camper, hunter, fisherman guy. And they made a small little butane, uh, it wasn't actually butane, but like a Coleman campfire stove out of a, uh, can. Like an aluminum can. Oh, wow. It was pretty cool. Anyway, so I had to send that to him. Um, so, yes, have your video on YouTube for that purpose. Now, I'm going to make a couple points. I, I, I pulled up, there's actually a video by, um, well, it says it's posted by Great Scott. And then it says it's Scott Willoughby or Willowee, Willow Lee, Willow Lee. That works, that works for me. Willow Lee. He's on at SEO Moz. Um, and the video has some really good information. But one of the points that he makes that, you know, really makes a whole lot of sense to me. If your video is something that you're using and you're having ads around your video, right? So, not in your video, but around your video, then you really want to host those videos on your own website. And why is that? Well, it's because if people are watching them on YouTube and your ads are there, and that's how you're making money by the ads around the video, not in the video, then people watching it on YouTube has little or no effect, positive effect. You know, this is back to calls to action. And you're less able to control the calls to action if they're watching

the videos on YouTube. Another really good point that Scott made was that if you're looking at the video, so now you've got, let's say you've got good placement. And you've got good placement for, let's say, SEO video to embed or not to embed. Okay. Those are your terms. And you've got good placement, so anybody who types in embed or not embed video, you're coming up. Now you're like, okay, well, I'd like to expand my viewership, and I stick it out on YouTube. But you've already got good placement. You want to be careful because YouTube carries a lot of weight. And so if you put in the right titles and information on that video and you actually kind of optimize that video for embed or not to embed, then that could actually end up stealing some of your thunder, if you will. So people might end up watching, again, the YouTube video instead of your video. So in essence, you could basically swap your listing for your website with a listing for your video. For your YouTube video on YouTube. Yeah, instead of, you know, if you have the number one spot and they click on it, they normally go to your website. Now they go to your video and, your YouTube video, and they completely miss your website and miss all the great information that's on your website. And the calls to action that you can control on your website. So, again, you know, at the end of the day, what's really important about what we do is the calls to action. So, again, great process. Post videos, don't post videos, post audio, post, you know, do all your search engine optimization, get traffic to your website one way or another, come hell or high water, get traffic there. Well, now you've got to do something with that traffic. And so those calls to action are really important. Just keep those in mind when you make that decision. So, John, when you're making that decision, there's really no reason to, you know, those are the

kinds of reasons that you want to be mindful of as you're deciding, do I want to host it locally or do I want to host it on YouTube? In general, I think it's going to be best to host it on YouTube. You want to make sure the end of your video has, well, you can, you know, your whole profile on YouTube can have links back to your website. Another, and I only found this one place, and I wasn't able to confirm this. So, if anybody out there knows the answer to this, I read one blog entry which stated that when you embed a video, a YouTube video on your website, that YouTube automatically creates a backlink to your website. That sounds incredibly valuable. Okay. That sounds really interesting. It's incredibly valuable because it's, you know, again, SEO backlinks, inbound links, and YouTube having so much credibility. There's two things that I first think of. One, I don't know that that's true. We don't have any embedded video here, so I wasn't actually able to play around and test this myself. So, again, I'm going to call on you guys out there, send us an email, make a, post a comment on our podcast, on our blog, something. Get us some information, call us, our phone number's on the website, something, if this is something that you know the answer to, does YouTube give you a backlink? The other point that I thought of was you already have control of your profile and information about your videos. Typically, you can put a link on a video, and you can make that link back to your website. Is that, you know, is there a difference between the automatic link that YouTube may or may not make back to your embedded video and the link that you create? So, is there any difference between those, and if there is, you know, what's the value of that? I would think that there isn't. I don't know. You know, my question is, where are those backlinks? Because I spend a

lot of time on, I love YouTube, and I'm like, I see a lot of people. You don't remember seeing any backlinks, right? I just don't remember seeing any, but maybe, you know, maybe I'm just too, I'm focused on hammer pants. Well, yeah, you think, and that, you know, that's the same with us. So, I've got Patrick videos on there, and the first thing, you know, I'm like, oh, I'm going to figure this out. I go right into Patrick's, and then I realize, wait a minute, I don't have any embedded videos. You know, all of our videos are hosted live, so my brilliant way to figure this out wasn't, you know, wasn't effective at all. Same with hammer pants. They probably may or may not have that embedded somewhere. And then that also begs the question, if you end up embedding in a whole lot of, you know, 20 different sites, is Google going to give a backlink to each of those 20 sites? I mean, YouTube, and how is YouTube going to balance, you know, which one or all of them or whatever? Yeah, I see. So, that's why I said I found that link, and then I spent, you know, the next couple days trying to find some confirmation of that. I did not, so my gut feeling is that is not true. However, you can, in fact, have a link inside your, when you post your video, so have that link back to your website. And then, again, make that decision. In Patrick's case, it would be very easy for us to put all of our videos. I wouldn't tend to, on pages that were already doing really well in SEO, I wouldn't want to optimize the video on YouTube. And when I say optimize, I mean, of course, the content. One of the questions and one of the things that Scott covered was, you know, how do you optimize a YouTube video? Well, you've got limited space. You've got a title and you've got a short description. So, you know, it's got

to be, you've got to have your keywords in there. And so, in the case of Patrick, if, you know, he's doing really well for quit smoking, he's got a little audio file. I could probably post an audio file with some PDF or some kind of PowerPoint presentation about smoking for terms like quit smoking or quit smoking CD. But if I did that, I wouldn't really want to optimize the title and the description because I don't want YouTube taking it away from traffic because, of course, I have a call to action on Patrick's quit smoking page, which is, you know, buy his quit smoking CD. So, that's just an example of, you know, where Scott makes a very valid point. And I certainly wouldn't want to optimize YouTube because YouTube has more credibility than Patrick's. So, it's possible that that could show up above Patrick's. And that makes sense. So, you know, if you can only right now, if you have a title and a description. Oh, I'm going to interrupt you real quick. One second. Hold that thought. In just a moment, we're going to give away the unknown secret to SEO. Oh, you know, I forgot. We said we were going to give that secret. Yeah. Well, why? That'll put us out of business. I mean, if we're giving away the secret, what are we here for? You know, we're here to give back. And we're just going to give it all back. Just giving away the farm here. So, if you, okay, when you're embedding videos, you can manipulate your title and you can manipulate, like, your description. So, I mean, there's got to be more to it than that to optimize it. I mean, what else? Because, okay, if I can put quit smoking video as my title and put quit smoking in my description, I mean, that's, there's got to be more to it than that. What else can somebody do to optimize that particular video? Inside of YouTube? Well, you know, there's not, I wouldn't say there's anything more to,

there isn't. You know, that's text. Google and Yahoo and everybody, all they can do is look at text. Oh, yeah, because they're not going to read the video. They can't. So, if that's the only text you have, you don't have control of meta tags, if you will, over those particular videos. You can optimize the name of the video. Okay. I don't think that has any credibility inside of YouTube, though, because they usually give it a generic name. It gets a, you know, a long coded name. Okay. Once it's in there. So, you are literally talking about, you know, I've got control over the title. Maybe reviews. You can have people review you. Okay. Because that's more text. And I'm not even sure that the text of the review would help that much. It should, because it's going to get crawled by Google. But it's the fact that it's been reviewed. And really, what we start talking about now is, okay, we've got the right text. How do we get people to watch it? Yeah. And one of the points that Scott made was that you want to keep the video short. Right? You know, you've only got two minutes to watch Hammer Pants. You don't got ten minutes. I mean, it turned into ten minutes. Because I watched it five times. But, you know, if you started off and like, hey, watch this ten minute video on dancing in a random store. You'd like, no, I don't have ten minutes to do that. No thanks, yeah. But two minutes you do. So, be mindful of your audience and how long is your video. Because that's going to impact how many people actually take the time to watch the video. And then, what else is there? That's it. That's all you, those are the things that you have to control. Well, what about transcription? Well, yeah, yeah, okay. So, you want to transcribe your video and post that. Because just like we transcribe this podcast and post it on our blog. Because that turns into a

lot of content. A lot of, you know, sometimes keyword rich, sometimes irrelevant content. For our website. Irrelevant content about iPhones and marrying into Google. Yeah. But it does turn into some good content. And it's dynamic content for Google. And I think that's also a great idea. Like you said, we transcribe our podcast. And I would even say not so people can read it. Because I don't think people actually read through the whole transcription. But it definitely helps with adding keywords. And it helps to get more traffic. It helps. Because, I mean, at the end of the day, the search engine will read. They can read the transcription. They're not. The spider is not listening to our podcast. Not yet. Yeah. Good point. Not yet. But, you know. It'll be a while. When we say SEO and search engine optimization and someone transcribes that for us, the spider can read search engine optimization and podcast and all the other keywords that we throw out there. So, transcription, I think, is a great, definitely a great way to bring traffic to your particular video. Yes. And now, here's the question. Because I don't know the answer to this. I don't think you have very much space to put in your description. I don't think you have very much space in the title. Okay. So, where do you put your transcription? And transcription was a point that Scott Willoughby, no, it is Willoughby made on SEOmoz. Is that, okay, transcribe it. But he didn't really say where you put that. Oh, yeah. That's a very good point. I'm not a video, we don't post that many videos, so this is not our area of expertise. We're just kind of sharing our thoughts on this and hopefully you can kind of glean some new information from our thoughts and some help your own thought process. And if anybody knows the answer, go ahead and pop it in to us. But if I've got this three-page transcription of my video, well, let's say it's only 10 minutes. Ours are actually

pretty long, so it would be about three pages for 10 minutes. Where do I post that? What do I post that in YouTube? And I'm not sure, I don't know the answer. I don't think that you can put it in the description. If you can, then you put it there, of course. Maybe there's a place in YouTube to actually put transcriptions. Okay. I mean, if I were YouTube, that would make a lot of sense because then it would make all of my videos a lot more searchable and I'd be able to get more relevant content to people for those people who actually took the time to do the transcriptions. So, that's a great point and I don't know exactly what to do with it. It should be very easy to figure out what, if anything, that you can do with it. Certainly, if you've got it on your website or you're putting it in a blog, you can do what we do, which is add our transcription as we add our podcast to our blog. So, there's still, and I think there's value in that, you know, putting it on your blog or your website because that will still bring traffic, it'll bring traffic to your website, you know, maybe not to your YouTube, your video on YouTube, but it'll still bring you traffic to your website. Yep. Absolutely. All right. So, do we want to do the unknown secret now or do we want to hop to, because you were talking about a couple analysis, analysis. Analysis. That's analysis that you did this week, one with an insurance company and one, interestingly enough, with an MEP company. We've mentioned MEP a couple times. Yes, with an MEP company. And that's mechanical, electrical. And plumbing. And plumbing. Using commercial contractors. It's a design. For what you told me, the insurance, we're going to look, he's in the Dallas area, so we'll end up doing a local campaign for him. And then MEP is going to start off with a regional, Texas regional. Yes. And then

go to a national campaign. Yeah. And she's based here locally. She's here in Houston. And we recommended that she start. She works in all over the world. She can take work all over the world. But we recommended, hey, let's start locally. Or not locally, regionally. Let's get some, let's focus on getting business here in Houston. You can get business in Dallas, Austin, San Antonio, the major cities here in Houston because we can, you know, we know we can get you great search engine placement and those. Quickly. Quickly. Very quickly. And then we can branch out, you know, after we've done those to other major cities and then go nationwide, which is exactly what's going to happen. And she was like, okay, yeah, that makes perfect sense. Let's do it. And as I recall, she's another example of, you know, our SEO client, a person who has approached us for SEO. And the first thing that we recommend is that they need to spend some time on their website. She definitely, and I mentioned this to her yesterday, hey, we'll definitely take your SEO. We'd love to help you. However, we, there's a few changes that we recommend you to make to your website that will help your conversions. And with hers, her, she had a, she had a good looking site, but if you click on her services page, it looks like a completely different website. Um, it looks like notebook paper, like someone wrote those, their, the content on a sheet of notebook paper. Um, I mean, it's night and day from her, from her homepage to her services page. And I said, listen, this kind of like when I first did clicked on this, I thought I went to a completely different website. And so if I think it, then some of your visitors are thinking it. So let's make some, some tweaks and some changes first, you know, whether you do, you do yourself or we do it, you know, whoever does it, we just would reckon, we know that making these

changes will help your conversion. So, you know, let's, let's try to do that first. And, you know, it's not, not every SEO company would have said that they'll say, Hey, yeah, give me your money and, uh, let's go move forward. Yeah. And we, we don't want to do that. I want to do what's best for her and her business. And again, we, we, we kind of stress this at the end of the day, great traffic doesn't really buy you anything if you can't convert it. So exactly, you know, if we can demonstrate that we're giving you a great traffic, then we could, we can easily demonstrate that we're doing our job and that you should continue with our service. Uh, but if, you know, from our perspective, if we're not bringing you stuff that's actually helping you to make money, you know, eventually our service should be obvious that, uh, that you should pay for it because it's paying for itself. Exactly. Yeah. And, and, and if your website is holding, uh, holding you back from that happening, then we, we'd like to fix that. All right, here we go. Is it time for the secret? It's time for the, we have no, uh, drum roll. And I haven't even, I, you know, I haven't even shared the secret with Paul. So drum roll beating in my forehead. Water, more water. There's Tylenol, aspirin, vitamin C, beta. That is what I need right now. A nap. Um, so the unknown secret to SEO really is. And as you can imagine, this might be a little bit anticlimactic. It's consistency. That what? That's it? Yeah. Oh man. I'm leaving. Like, I mean, I'm thinking it's, we're going to have like a fireworks, not the sky. Yeah. Consistency. Consistency. That's it. Consistency. Consistently apply everything that we've been talking about in our podcast. Just do that consistently and you will get great search engine placement. It's not rocket science. We've said that before. It is about consistency. If you took a 50,000 foot view, the reality is

if you only listen to this one podcast and you follow this one direction for this one page that you want, make that page about the keywords that you're targeting, put content on it about the keywords that you're targeting, make it relevant, make it interesting, make it readable, throw some images in it, throw some outbound links in it, and then go and get people to link to it. Does that sound like rocket science? Does that sound, that didn't sound good? Anybody can do that. It sounded kind of consistent. Yeah. Just keep plugging away. Consistently good things so that people want to visit your website naturally, then the search engines are going to recognize that, give you credit for that, put you on the first page, you're going to grow your business, and if consistency, at least with regard to content and websites and everything is not what you do, then you should give us a call because we're very consistent at being consistent, consistently for you. Where would they call us? They would call us at, that's a great question, 713-592-6724. Or you can email us at podcast at e-webstyle.com. That is our podcast for today. Join us next time. We love hearing from you, and we love spending time with you. These, for us, it's Fridays. By the time you get these, who knows when it is. It's early Friday. Thank you for listening. Until next time, bye-bye. Bye. Set me free. Set me free.