Below are the 20 steps to promoting your videos on YouTube;

YOUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL  – Optimizing Your YouTube Channel

1. If you haven’t created your channel yet, make sure the username you create contains or is your brand name and/or keyword
2. The same with your channel name; it should include your brand and/or keyword(s)
3. When creating your channel, you have a chance to add your website address. Make sure that you do that.
4. You’ll also have a chance to write something about you or your company in the about me section, write at least 1 paragraph containing your target keyword(s) naturally

EACH VIDEO – Tips to optimize each video you upload

1. You want to make sure the video title is accurate to what the video is about. But at the same time, you want to make it catchy and try to include your target keywords (Sometimes the video title is the only thing to entice users to click and watch)
2. Web Address in description: Add your website URL (http://www.clientsite.com) to the beginning of each video description. And/or at the end of the description
3. Keywords in description: When writing the description, try to include target keywords (NATURALLY)
4. Add keyword tags to video as well

YOUTUBE NETWORKING – Things to do within YouTube

1. Make friends with at least 20 other users that talk about the same topics
2. Send your new friends a message encouraging then to check out your videos (IE: Hey (YouTube Name, saw your videos and liked them a lot, you should check out ours. Let me know what you think about them, or comment your thoughts, THANKS!)
3. Comment on 5 other related YouTube channels, naturally including keyword(s) in the comment (IE: I noticed all you vids are about [keyword], mine too! But, I’m not sure if mine are as good as yours. What do you think?)
4. Find at least 5 other videos containing the keywords you are targeting and comment something relevant and sticky.
5. Comment on your own Video Channel thanking others for visiting (include keyword in content)

OUTSIDE OF YOUTUBE – Off-page/Off-YouTube Optimization

1. If possible, embed video on other webpages, blogs or wherever to add  popularity.
2. Contact bloggers that talk about your video’s topic (target keywords) and ask them to check out your video. If they like it, they will link to it or embed on their blog.
3. Build links to video
4. Social bookmark video in social networks
5. Share video via FaceBook
6. Share video via Twitter
7. Share video via email with subscriber list or friends

If you follow these steps and your video is good, you’ll get more views than you expect.

SIDE NOTE: The algorithm changes are more frequent today because Google doesn’t have to update the whole algorithm when they want to make an simple update anymore. Before, they had to update the whole algorithm at once if they ever wanted to make changes. So the changes were taken more seriously and made less frequently. But now, because of Panda, if they ever want to make an update, they can just update individual variables of the formula instead of replacing the whole formula with a completely new one. And since Google likes to test, test, test, they switch out or add different factors here and there, more often.

The most recent change was the over-optimization update Matt Cutts already hinted at a couple months back. So the SEO community was already ranting and raving about how to anticipate it. I think Google was being nice by warning webmasters and giving them a chance to make sure the update doesn’t drop them off the face of Google Search.

This is why it pays to keep an ear to the industry and to listen to whatever Google has to say (after all, we are trying to rank on their search engine).

Again, if you are a client of ours, don’t worry, we got you covered

The reason Google customizes their searches is to provide YOU with the best results possible. For instance if you are a social networking junkie, you may get results that get more votes in social networks compared to your grandma who may get more .edu or webmd/about.com style results. This is how Google makes sure YOU come back to their search engine. Google’s intent aside, the purpose of this post is to tell you why everyone gets different results.

Here is a list of reasons why everyone’s results vary

• User Activity – Google can tell if YOU like lengthy articles or funny videos. So your results may change base on that.
• Signed Into Google? – Signing in and out of Google used to be a way to turn on and off Google personalized results. But now that just turns on and off Google+ Your World. You can still get personalized results even if signed out
• Favorite Sites Historically – If Google notices you like about.com for your tough questions, you’ll see more about.com results than someone that never clicks on the about.com listings.
• Computer Location – Google can tell where you are located (based on IP, Service provider, social stuff, etc.) So your results could be tailored to your location.
• Location of Website – Google knows where websites are based (not hosted) so they can associate that location with the searcher’s location.
• Computer Speed & Website Load Time – Google knows how fast websites load and what type of connection you have and can determine which websites to give you based on that.
• Browsers – Whether you use Safari, Firefox, IE, or whatever. Google has an idea of how different websites perform based on the browser. Same with the OS (Mac or PC)
• You’re Preferences – If you have it set to display 10 listings or 100 listings can make a different in rankings.
• Multiple Data Centers – Google has data centers all over the world. Sometimes your website pulls from the closest data center. Sometimes the data center you are using is running a test of Google’s newest algorithm changes. Sometimes data centers rotate. Sometimes the data center you use is based on your OS or browser.

In summary, rarely do two people get the exact same search results from Google. Sometimes even if they are the same sex, sitting next to each other on the same computers, signed out of Google and sharing the same internet service provider, they can still have different search results. Although in this example chances are the results will only vary slightly.

The best way to determine how your website ranks according to Google and to the masses is to check your Google Webmaster Tools account and look at the “Average”.

They’ve already updated their algorithm more times in the 1st few months of 2012 than in all of 2008 & 2009 combined. Here’s the count of Google Updates since 2008.

• 2008 – 2 Updates
• 2009 – 4 Updates
• 2010 – 8 Updates
• 2011 – 21 Updates

With only 3 months into 2012, Google has already updated their algorithm 11 times. At this rate, we’ll be looking at ~40 algorithm changes by the end of the year (which will double the amount of updates in 2011). This year’s algorithm changes include;

1. January 5, 2012 – January 30-Pack Update
2. January 10, 2012 – Search + Your World Update
3. January 18, 2012 – Panda 3.2 Update
4. January 19, 2012 – Ads Above the Fold Update
5. February 3, 2012 – February 17-Pack Update
6. February 27, 2012 – Venice Update
7. February 27, 2012 – February 40-Pack (2) Update
8. February 27, 2012  – Panda 3.3 Update
9. March 12, 2012 – Search Quality Video Update
10. March 23, 2012 – Panda 3.4 Update
11. April 3, 2012 – March 50-Pack Update

Despite all these updates, you can count on SEOhaus to be on top of them. We anticipate these updates and even re-create new strategies to capitalize on them. Our clients get the most up-to-date services designed around Google’s algorithm updates, no matter how often they arise.

If you are not a client and have experienced drops in rankings due to these updates, contact us today. We can help get your website back on track.

So if you see any crawl errors in your dashboard, fix them!

What Causes Crawl Errors?

There are many reasons why crawl errors happen. They include;

• old pages being removed
• technical restraints
• robots.txt disallowing
• and many more

The Solutions

There are only a couple solutions to fixing your crawl errors.

1. Put a page back at the location of the URL that causing errors
2. Or, 301 redirect old (error) URL to new most relevant (live) page/URL

Sometimes, it’s a CMS or server conflict that requires troubleshooting. But 90% of the time you have to do either of the 2 solutions above.

Now that You’ve Fixed the Errors..

Once you’ve cleaned up the errors with either of the above 2 (or 3 solutions), you have to let Google know that those errors have been fixed.

You can do this by selecting the URL’s and clicking “Mark As Fixed” under the Crawl Errors section of GWT. (Next time Google returns to your website, they will confirm that they are no longer running into errors by removing the number of errors.)

After you’ve marked errors as fixed, go to the sitemaps section of Google Webmaster Tools and click “Resubmit Sitemap”. At the very bottom of the page, it will say “No Errors Found”

Viola! You’ve fixed the crawl errors and officially notified Google about these fixes. Now the crawl bots can freely (and happily) crawl your website and let Google know about all of your great content (that they may not have been able to access before).

Below are 10 “tools” we recommend you understand and fix/configure to make sure your website is running smoothly, and indexed properly for Google Search.

Site Configuration > Sitemaps – Once you’ve created your website (or after you’ve made all the fixes in the other tools below) it is HIGHLY recommended that you submit your XML sitemap to Google. This is the fastest way to ask Google to index all of the pages of your website. This is also the fastest way to identify which pages haven’t been indexed.

Site Configuration > Settings – The only option that really matters in this section is “Preferred URL”. Pick the one your website canonicalizes to (www or non-www versions). This usually requires verifying both versions, though.

Your site on the Web > Search Queries – Here you can see all of the terms that your website is getting action from. Google tells you the keywords that give you impressions and clicks, as well as your website click-through-rate, average position, and position changes. You can also star and monitor specific keywords, and even export a report.

Your site on the Web > Content Keywords – This shows you the keywords that according to your website’s content are most important. If you don’t see your target keywords on the list, then obviously your website isn’t relevant to them. Kind of like the old school keyword density checker SEO tools.

Your site on the Web > Internal Links – These are links pointing from one page of your website to another page within your website. What one page on your website calls another is very important to Google (hence providing a tool within GWT). Some may even debate that internal links are just as important as backlinks from other websites. However, keep in mind, optimizing this too much could possibly raise the “over-SEO” flag.

Your site on the Web > Links to Your Site – Speaking of backlinks, the most important SEO factor. Knowing where all your links are coming from and which pages they point to could give you great insight, especially if you assign keywords and content based on which links point to different pages.

+1 Metrics > Search Impact – Since Google+ is the “new thing”, and since we’re working closely with Google+ to make sure we’re making the best of it for our clients, this is a good place to see the effectiveness of our Google+ initiatives. If you don’t see anything, then you need to get more pages plussed!

Diagnostics > Crawl Errors – This is one of the most important tools within GWT. This tool tells you all the pages the Googlebot couldn’t access. Google usually finds these errors via the sitemap, backlinks or internal links. If there are any crawl errors, it is recommended to either make sure that there’s a page at that URL, or to 301 redirect it to the most relevant live page.

Diagnostics > HTML Suggestions – This is where Google tells you about duplicate, too short, and too long title tags and meta descriptions. No title tags or descriptions should be identical to each other, nor should any only have 2 words or have more than ~15-20 words. A new feature they have in this section is “non-informative title tag”. I’d venture to say this is one of the most important ones within this section, given the fact that Google is imposing new “over-SEO” rules, and are always striving to deliver relevance.

Labs > Site Performance – Since late 2010/early 2011, site speed has become extremely important. If your website takes longer than most in your industry to load, it could turn Google off. Google searchers want answers fast, and if your site is so slow that they click the back button, it makes Google look like they present lame/slow/non-performing sites.

There are a few other tools within Google Webmaster Tools that are just as valuable as the ones mentioned above. The tools necessary for success could also vary depending on the website. For some websites perhaps only 3 of the above tools make sense, while for other websites more tools are necessary. Regardless, it’s recommended to play around with each tool within GWT to familiarize yourself with both your website and what Google thinks about it.

We all know that there are sites ranking for terms that shouldn’t be ranking at all, and Google knows this as well. As always, Google wants to make sure all the top ranking site on their search engine are not only legit, but deserves to be there. He mentioned various optimization factors good sites possess, as well as what “cheating” sites tend to do. They are trying to get rid of sites that put more effort into their SEO than into making their sites user friendly.

Here is a list of what over optimized websites have:

• Over optimized title tags
• Strictly keyword-rich internal links
• Keywords listed on website
• Ugly site design
• Weak content
• Low value proposition
• Obvious that they are only ranking because of SEO
• Too many keywords within a given area
• Changed “Home” links’ anchor text to top keyword
• Domain name is keyword

There could be more factors or the same ‘ole ones. Google will either ratchet up the amount of penalty or dampening that those spam signals merit algorithmically or they will have new over-optimization signals implemented as well.

Here is a list of what the top ranking sites will possess:

• Great design
• Answers to all types of queriers’ questions
• Resourceful
• Contextual/LSI content to support target keywords
• Links from other sites ranking in top 100 of niche keyword terms
• Encourages users to visit multiple pages
• Low bounce rates
• High average time on site

As you can see, website quality is better than too much SEO.

If you are a client, hopefully you take these considerations into account. Because, even if we continue to do the best SEO in the world, Google wont give you a chance if your websites isn’t meeting their quality guidelines. If you want to know more about Google’s Website Guidelines, you can check them out here.

Social media factors don’t replace old factors such as total backlink count and title tags. They are just additional tasks that need to be accomplished. But remember, if you site is TRULY interesting, social media isn’t really extra work, because naturally others with like, share, tweet, plus, etc your website without you having to actively promote it. But initially, you have to do something to get the ball rolling. Below are a few tips to get your website moving in the right direction (up or virally);

FACEBOOK

1. Create a Facebook business profile (with catchy welcome page and/or profile picture)
2. Encourage friends to ‘like’ your business profile
3. Make friends with high followed profiles and comment on their likes and statuses
4. Drip share various pages of your website on business wall, between statuses
5. Share the most interesting videos in your niche on your business wall (unless it belongs to the competition)

TWITTER

1. Create a Twitter page for business (with background & unique profile pic)
2. Sync Twitter w/Facebook so you only have to do one or the other
3. Submit Twitter profile to twitter directories: http://blog.tvider.com/2010/04/02/top-8-twitter-directories/
4. Make friends with everyone that tweets your target keywords

YOUTUBE

1. Create a channel (Fill in about me section with keywords and add website URL)
2. Comment on videos with your target keywords in the title
3. Comment on most popular YouTube channels in niche
4. Comment on videos that rank on Google for your target keywords

TOP NETWORKS

1. Join the following networks and fill in all details when joining
2. Vote, share, like, comment, or anything at least once at each site

• Delicious
• StumbleUpon
• Reddit
• Digg

GOOGLE PLUS (best for last)

1. Make sure you have a personal profile
2. Create a Business profile
3. Do these Google Plus Strategies

EXTRA – If you still want more, or have the time..

1. Join more social networks, create full profiles at each, make friends with users and ‘network’
2. Use the AdditctOmatic tool to search all networks mentioning your keyword & comment or create some type of connection between your profile and the user, post, tweet, etc.

YOUR SITE

1. Make sure it’s easy to share every page of your website via the popular social networks

• You can use widgets on your blog
• Google plus widget on site
• Add to Any button for all social networks everywhere

This way, should someone come to your site and like it, it’s easy for them to share it. In fact, it can’t hurt to use verbiage to encourage sharing.

For instance, if you are a pet supplier and your target keywords are “pet food”, “cat food” and “dog food”, you would most likely assign “pet food” to your top level pet food page, “cat food” to your cat food page and “dog food” to your dog food page. Once you have your list of 3, 10, 25, or 100 keywords, you start out assigning keywords to the pages that are most naturally relevant to them. If you have several “pet supply” keywords it’s easy to assign them to the homepage. If you have specific dog food keywords, it’s easy to identify your dog food page and to assign that keyword to that particular page.

Why Keyword Assignment?

The reason you assign keywords to pages is to help Google identify the structure of your website and to ensure the best odds of ranking for a particular keyword. Let’s face it, your cat food page will have a very slim chance at ranking for “dog food”. Simply because the page is not about dog food and you can’t naturally say dog food in all the high value locations on a cat food page.

When you assign a keyword to a page, that page must be about that particular keyword. You should be able to find that keyword in the title tag (title of that page), the meta description (page description), the headings (H1, H2, H3, etc) and most of all within the content. Ideally that page should be all about the keyword assigned to it. If the cat food page is really about cat food, it shouldn’t be hard to not only assign cat food to that page, but to put it in all the locations your shoppers/users would look.

Assigning Keywords to the Right Pages

In some cases your whole website is relevant to a keyword, or you can’t think which page is MOST relevant to a particular keyword. Therefore, you may have a hard time deciding if your “dry dog food” page or your “wet dog food” page should be the page that targets “dog food”. Here are some pages to consider.

• Your top level dog food page just above your wet dog food and dry dog food page
• The page already saying dog food naturally the most
• The page you want to show up in the results for “dog food”

Keep in mind, you can have multiple pages all targeting the same keywords. You just have to pick a page that targets it the most, or have the keyword more prominent & dense on the target page.

How to Determine Which Page Will Rank the Fastest for Your Target Term

Consider your website is SuperPetSuppliesOnline.com and you are trying to decide which one of your pages already has the highest chance of ranking for “dog toys”. You may have 100′s of  dog toys, but you are unsure which page you should be back linking or internally linking to. Based on the above information, your top level dog toys category page should be your target page. However, for this example, you are looking for the page that is already indexing high in Google, and with a little push it could be on the first page. Here are the steps to determine which page already has the best chance at ranking for “dog toys”

1. Go to Google.com
2. search site:superpetsuplliesonline.com “dog toys”
3. and/or search site:superpetsuppliesonline.com dog toys

Google will display only pages from superpetsuppliesonline.com. But will rank the most relevant page(s) to “dog toys” first. This is how you can tell which pages, according to Google is already relevant to your target terms.

If the top results are way off (not relevant to your target terms at all), then you have a problem. You must start from the beginning of this article and decide which page to assign that target keyword to, add that keyword in all the high value locations of the page, then start (off page & internally) linking to that page using that target keyword.

If you are still having trouble assigning keywords to their appropriate pages, contact us today. We can help!

1. You must be in as many circles as possible

This is NOT the same as adding a variety of users to your circles. When you do that, all you are doing is getting what they plus streamed to your wall. The goal is to get what you plus to show up on other peoples’ walls. So, how do I get a lot of followers you might ask? Well, for starters, re-share all the really good (non-competitive) pages others in your niche plus. You’ll be piggy backing whoever plussed it before you and as others notice your profiles, they will add you to their circle in hopes that you’ll always be sharing topics of interest.

You could simply add 100′s of other users in hopes that a percentage of them add you to their circles in return. But before doing this, if you want them to add you back, it is imperative that you make sure your wall/plus stream is filled with pages that will interest others and entice them to re-share it on their walls.

2. Others must plus what you share.

Whether you’re in 10 other users’ circles or in 1,000, a certain percentage (10% percent has proven well) of your ‘followers’ must plus or comment on what you share. This indicates to Google that what you share holds some type of value. If you share/plus 100 pages and no one re-shares, plusses or comments on them, Google could tell that what you share isn’t valuable, and it could do more harm to what you plus than help. So you either have to be careful on what you plus, or on who follows you. The key is to be resourceful and to help Google determine which pages are important for their search engine.

3. Post Frequently

For some reason, Google really likes the active plusser. It is recommended to plus at least 1 to 2 pages a week. This not only shows that you are active and current, it also keeps you in the mix with all the other obsessive plussers. This increases your odds of other users finding you as well. The challenge is posting often AND making sure your posts are of interest to others. This may seem difficult to achieve, however it actually isn’t too hard to quickly find a page 1/10th of your followers would like. Consider an interesting craft at Pinterest, something hot on a popular news site, a funny Youtube video, or a great tutorial associated with your niche. The net is full of catchy stuff, and Google realizes this. You just have to prove that you are a trusted contributor. And make sure every once in a while you add your site to the mix; after all your site is interesting, right??

So, there you have it, 3 strategies you must keep in mind when trying to become a Google Plus pro.

If you are a client and need assistance, please let us know. We are SEO professionals and Google Plus plays a big role in Google’s new algorithm. So, yes, we know what we are doing and can help you every step of the way If you are trying to make your own business profile (different than personal), here’s a Google Plus Business tutorial straight from Google.