YouTube is a terrific place to promote and advertise your business. In an image driven world full of competition, videos are a great way to get noticed and to stay relevant. However, simply posting a video, on any social media site, is not quite enough. You need to draw traffic to your video so it can be seen by your target audience. This is an essential key to making sure your video is actually marketing your business and ranking your YouTube videos

A lot of research has been conducted on how to make the most effective video, get the best ranking and most views on YouTube. This research has produced a few tips on how to best optimize your videos.

Make it Brief

Try to keep your video at around three minutes. Never make a video longer than this unless it is for some type of demonstrative purpose that is impossible to make shorter.

Make Better Videos not More Videos

It is a better use of your time and will produce more views if you spend your time to make high quality videos instead of a high quantity of videos.

Many companies ignore Search Engine Optimization because they payoff is not apparent immediately and they often do not know what needs to be done to improve their position in the search engines. But it is vital especially for new and smaller companies and there are certain factors that you can work on that will provide a lift.

The three keys to a better ranking in Google are backlinks, page speed and content. A recent study looked at 20 possible ranking factors and determined that five of the twenty were the most important. First was the number of websites that have links to yours. If the number of sites linking to you is high, Google will rank you better. This is classic SEO. It is common to think that the quality of a backlink is important. The quantity is also still very important. While getting links from similar sites is great.

Only advanced SEO methods produce the results that you really want. There uncommon tactics will help your site get better positioning in Google.

Use a service like Ahrefs to find sites that are linking to your competitors. You might have trouble getting page 1 competitor links but as you move further down in the results, you will find that older sites linking out to page 5+ will be willing to add your site to their set of relevant links. Send their webmaster a request to link to your new more robust content.

Info graphics still work but are getting a little overplayed. Make sure your info graphic has great data and looks incredible. Add some motion to your info graphic to get a lot more social shares and traffic back to your site.

Freelance writer / critic Leonard Pierce on the panel "Songs Absorb Conflict" at the 2008 Pop Conference, Experience Music Project, Seattle, Washington. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Are You Making These 6 SEO Copywriting Blunders?

If you’re like me, you already have. Heck, no one’s perfect. But, Google’s 2011 release of Panda (and 20 subsequent updates so far) means that the search engine focuses on quality content much more than ever before.

Because Google’s goal lies in serving the best quality search results, you can bet it will continually refine its ability to give the marketplace what it wants. What Google means by quality is much different than what an experienced freelance writer produces as a final product. But, if you pay attention to these 6 common blunders, you keep the quality of your copy at a level both Google and your readers appreciate.

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How to Get More out of Google Analytics

As a website owner there's a good chance you use Google Analytics to track visits to your website. It can be a very powerful tool to get to know your website, visitors, and keywords intimately -- provided you know where to look and what to look for. Here are some top tips to getting the most out of your Analytics account. 

What really is Search Engine Optimization? (Photo credit: Go Local Search)

Getting The Most From SEO

For successful results with SEO, you need to be constantly one step ahead of your competitors. The following five tips can help you to achieve the search engine ranking that you are looking for:

1.) Creating Content

Having easy to read, relevant and interesting content on your site is important, and fresh content is a great way to attract and keep visitors. Good content not only appeals to readers of your site, but to the indexing programs of the search engines too.

Good content can include articles and blogs, and it can also help to increase your number of external backlinks, helping your SEO even further.

What SEO Hosting To Choose

If you're unsure about which SEO hosting to use, this may be of assistance. Several IP SEO Hosting or multiple c-class IPs are recommended. Search engines prefer these sites with varied IP addresses. It helps to diversify them and keep them on distinct c-classes. Also, if the search engine's algorithm changes and your website is affected, you will not lose all of your rankings. Google finds no connection between the other sites you own and your primary site. If you want to preserve your ranks, you should test multiple IP addresses for your website.

When choosing SEO hosting, it is important to note that you should use at least two different IPs. This will help your website in the long run by diversifying it with more authority and getting more social signals, especially if your main site has had some issues in the past. It is also good to diversify as much as possible so if something changes in the algorithm, such as aggressive penguin, or something else that affects your rankings negatively, then you will not lose them all.

Search engines like multiple c-class IPs because they see this as a diversity of IPs. This is useful in keeping your websites on different c-class, which can be helpful in keeping them around if the algorithm changes and hits them. And Google will not see that your websites are related so it won't affect your rankings.

Search engine optimization is an ever-evolving process. eCommerce, social media and content marketing are all part of that process, so you need to stay on top of the game and keep up with new search algorithms, changes in website structure and content. Because of how this information can change, it's hard to know what SEO hosting you should use for your business. But when it comes to multiple IP SEO hosting or multiple c-class IPs, they give you more options. Using different IP addresses can be helpful in diversifying your online presence and keeping your website safe from being penalized by search engines. Also, if your algorithm changes and hits your website, you won't lose all of your rankings because eCommerce platforms see no relationship between other sites owned by the same business owner. In order to ensure that you stay ahead of the curve, consider using multiple IPs for your own website today!

Image via CrunchBase

One of the biggest fears held by most website owners is that any small mistake they make in producing their content or interacting their users will immediately lead to precipitous drop in their ranking at major search engines like Google. And, while it's responsible to avoid these pitfalls and mistakes altogether, it's worth noting that an immediate and mind-blowing drop at the internet's search leader is simply not likely in many cases. Such a theory was proved correct by an SEO firm which recently decided to deliberately destroy a reputable website's search engine rankings. As part of its project to make a first-page result into a last-page afterthought, the company loaded that website up with more than 50,000 undesirable links. This included forum posts, blog comment links, and other links placed into the sidebar for the sole effect of destroying the site's reputation.

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During recent years in field of search optimization, there has been a push for SEO strategies to incorporate what is known as social media optimization. Older, more established companies that still go the way of the dinosaur will say that there's no verifiable impact because most social media provides links that are "nofollow" Though it was a relatively small test, the data behind this infographic shows otherwise.

We at TastyPlacement, Inc. decided to conduct a test of six similarly situated websites. While the results are not concrete, the tendencies that each nearly identical website displayed are signs that are trustworthy enough which to take note.

In fact, the results make sense once you take a look at each of them. It makes sense that Google, no matter how sophisticated its algorithms may ever be, will find that the most reliable search results are those which people manually "approve". The basis for Google Plus activity affecting search engine ranking therefore make sense, as does the amount of Google Followers, Facebook promotion and even Twitter tweets.