Search Engine Optimization: October 2011

Monday, October 31, 2011

SEO Book.com

Potential Usage & Brand Signals for Panda

Posted: 30 Oct 2011 06:38 PM PDT

Google collects a lot of information on individuals & can have some level of confidence if the person is a real person or not based on things like their history of email usage, if they have a credit card on file, how they interact with other high confidence real accounts, how many people are friends with them on Google+, usage of an Android cell phone, their search history, etc.

Google doesn't need all those signals on any individual, just some blend of them.

From there they can create a lot of usage-based brand signals.

Query Volume + Click Distribution

For any keyword Google can see the search volume & the click distribution on the search results.

If a lot of people click on the top result & very few people click on the second or third result there is a strong chance the keyword is a brand. If the click distribution is spread more evenly across the search results then it is less likely to be a brand keyword.

The above was a hypothetical example, but the following image shows how lower volume branded navigational keywords can drive far more traffic than broader industry keywords. We get twice as much traffic for seobook & seo book as we do for seo.

Query Chains

When people search for a generic keyword they may (immediately or later) modify their search query to search for related keywords. In the past Microsoft offered a search funnels tool that would show common searches before & after a keyword. If someone searched for credit cards they might soon search for visa or mastercard.

Shortly after Google's Vince update, a Googler described the algorithmic change as being attributed to query chains.

High User Acceptance

Of course getting the user to click is just the first step. From there you must satisfy them. ;)

If you visit a page quickly & then jump right back to the search results Google asks users for an explicit vote against that site.

And if you visit a page for a significant period of time Google asks users for an explicit vote for that site.

That Google is measuring the time until return the search results to determine which explicit vote to request also implies that they can use the same aggregate data to create an implicit signal.

Where this measurement can get a bit fuzzy is that Panda can create a self-reinforcing impact (good or bad).

Some examples...

Self-Reinforcing Positive Impacts

Let's say your site got a ranking boost by Panda. It will rank higher across broader industry keywords, to where people may enter your site at the category level (say shoes or Nike shoes) and then surf around your site quite a bit. This equates to a longer time on site & a better user experience.

2 more factors on this front are branded navigation & familiarity.

On some search results Google shows branded search options.

If clicking those brand & store links feeds into the Vince relevancy signal, then any brand featured there has a huge wind at their back, building further brand signals. Eventually such suggestions can work their way into Google Instant keyword suggestions as well. Even if people do not click on those particular options, the various highlights in the search results act as advertisements for the brands, which drive incremental demand and search volume for those brands.

Amazon.com is responsible for roughly 1/3 of ecommerce spend in the United States (outside of travel), so many people might go and research product options generally & then conclude those search sessions by seeing if they can buy it off Amazon.com (due to getting free shipping & the high level of user trust Amazon has). As this becomes part of search relevancy algorithms this is the online equivalent of going to your local Borders store to find something to buy & then buying it on Amazon. In the short run you save a few Dollars, but in the long run stores like Borders go out of business.

Self-Reinforcing Negative Impacts

There are 2 bad ways a business can be impacted by Panda. One is missing out on the above promotional options that a large competitor may enjoy, which over time build more brand signals for them & leave your site stranded in no man's land until it is finally clipped by Panda for lacking "quality."

A second issue is a self-reinforcing issue with Panda. On WMW a user nicknamed Walkman described it as the "size 13 shoe problem." After you have been hit by Panda you are not likely to rank for broader category level searches. However you might still rank for some really obscure longtail keyword that is uneconomic to address directly (and thus only have a glancing mention of the user's intent). Your page might say we do not carry size 13 or size 13 out of stock and your Panda-hit site ranks for "Nike Carmelo Anthony size 13." Thus the user bounces, creating a self-reinforcing negative user experience signal.

A third (non-Panda) issue that can cause poor user experience metrics is when Google mutates the search query in a way that makes the organic results irrelevant.

More on User Votes

Google has long used reviews in their ranking algorithms & even made a tweak to demote businesses with negative reviews.

The above examples of +1 votes and blocks can be used (along with the time on site & repeat visits) to gauge user satisfaction, however if they can't get enough engagement then it will be very easy for big brands to buy that signal for pennies on the Dollar, as some social signals are easily bought by brands.

Not only does Amazon directly integrate promoting your wishlist on social media ...

... but they also have done interesting promotions like a "Tweet & get" ...

Imagine if/when a new local Wal-Mart store launches offering a free $10 coupon to everyone who Tweets their savings at the checkout counter!

One big issue I have with the +1 votes & blocks is that they apply across the board. I may dislike some craptastic videos hosted on YouTube, but there is also a lot of great content there. I love eBay for vintage video games, but it does not mean I love them for books.

Likewise some of the friend of friend stuff can be a bit off.

At some point Google should make +1 votes & blocks more granular.

Near the end of this article I will also further discuss some issues with ad votes.

Repeat Visits

Does Google measure repeat visitors? Yes.

They use that user interaction to ask for an explicit vote...

...and they can use it as an implicit vote as well.

User Location

Once it is obvious Google is counting certain types of user metrics (just like they count links) there will be a race to the bottom to provide those said signals. That race to the bottom will lead to such signals being sold by accounts that either have sketchy trust metrics associated with them (if done through automation) and/or in markets with lower living costs.

In addition to AdSense & Google Analytics, Google has huge search market share, a widely distributed toolbar and their Chrome web browser. They can track where language is used in certain ways and where a site is popular

And they can also track where the votes come from.

Domain Name

If your domain name matches your keyword that may be a brand signal. However, Google may also look at some other signals (like user engagement, repeat visits, relative CTR, etc.) as confirmation signals on this front.

URL Links

Sometimes when a spammer builds links they trap themselves by using the same anchor text too much. Whereas when a branded website pulls in organic citations the anchor text tends to be mixed up, like...

http://www.paypal.com
www.paypal.com
Pay pal.com
paypal.com
pay pal
Paypal
paypal payments
etc.

Diversity in any sense (anchor text, linking sources, pages being linked to, links built across time, etc.) is generally considered a good thing.

Other types of links might also be seen as potential brand signals. For instance, frequent exposure in trusted news sites, other trusted seed sites, or other known brand sites could pass additional karma. Some link spikes that are also associated with strong direct traffic spikes, strong referral traffic from the links, and strong brand searches might also boost the weight given to links.

Non-search Brand Data Sources

Google has suggested they could use user direction look up as a relevancy signal.
In local search Google has long used the sites they displaced in the organic results as citations (even if they were in some cases unlinked).
In addition to offering branded filters in their internal navigation, many merchants submitting their products to Google product search may also be giving Google signals about which brands matter.
Google will be able to lean into Zagat ratings for business & other data sources (Google Wallet, Google Offers, etc.) will provide additional signals to Google.

Advertising

Any type of non-search distribution you have (RSS subscribers, email newsletters, mobile applications, physical stores, membership loyalty programs, etc.) makes it easier to influence search engines.

If advertising with Google had a negative impact on search relevancy you can be sure that the relevancy algorithms would change. Whereas if there is a convenient positive spill over then Google won't complain. In fact, they will even go out of their way to advertise that spill over. Any sort of advertising you do increases brand awareness. And that leads to additional incremental brand searches (and thus brand signal)

More exposure also leads to more user experiences, which in turn leads to more opportunities for people to leave signals behind (be it links, social mentions, additional brand searches, and/or repeat visits).

On YouTube Google counts some ad views as organic views (thus undermining relevancy) and more recently Google has implemented the controversial policy of putting +1 buttons in display ads.

Even if those votes don't influence rank directly, they still influence user perception. And what is so bad about that is that users are only voting of the content of the ad. This basically is the equivalent of cloaking.

If the landing page doesn't match the ad (free iPad anyone???) then people are going to see their friends vouching for scams & get duped by Google.

That is worse that a press release being advertised as though it was news

You can also be certain that some clever spammers are integrating +1 buttons in display ads on other ad networks in ways that may automatically collect user clicks & so on, or have users pay for viewing their next porn video by clicking a +1 button (much like some old school email spammers used porn viewers as manual captcha breakers).

Google does offer the ability to vote against an ad as well, but if an ad looks great upfront & its the landing page that scams you then how exactly do you vote against it if you don't see the site until after you click the ad?

Categories:

google

Friday, October 28, 2011

AboutUs Weblog

Use SEO To Research Your Competition

Posted: 27 Oct 2011 10:00 AM PDT

You already know you can – and should – use search engine optimization (SEO) tactics and thinking to boost your own website above competitors in search results. But did you know you can use your knowledge of SEO to research the competition? Check out how they’re getting results, and steal those ideas! But make sure you avoid any bad SEO practices you uncover.

To make the most of SEO-based research, read SEO for Competitive Analysis by AboutUs author Michelle Knight. It’s a great guide, and you don’t even need to be an SEO expert to use the tips and advice you’ll find there. Michelle is a professional software tester, and she understands how to make technical information clear for the rest of us. For example, she tells you how to research the keywords your competitors rank for, and get ideas for outranking your competitors in ways you never thought about before.

Did you know you can use the AboutUs Site Report to track how well you rank in Google for your 20 most important keywords? You can also track how your competitors are doing on those same keywords. The Site Report also points out which elements of your website can be improved to help you rank higher in Google, and tells you how to fix those issues.

You can learn more about SEO, and many different areas of Web marketing, by browsing through the Learn section of AboutUs.org. We’ve published more than 100 articles on all kinds of topics that are important to small business owners. All our articles are written in clear language that any business owner can understand. The Learn section is free, just like most services we offer to website owners on AboutUs.org.

Thursday, October 27, 2011

SEO Book.com

Spam? Affiliate is a 4 Letter Word

Posted: 27 Oct 2011 12:59 PM PDT

Google Hates Affiliates

Years before Google broadly torched affiliates operating inside the AdWords channel I highlighted how much Google hated affiliates in their ecosystem.

How was I aware of that?

2 ways:

If you read any of Google's older guidelines that leaked over the years you would see a consistent disdain toward affiliate sites. This was also reflected in official advice at search engine conferences & whatnot.
A friend of mine went to Google's campus & Google offered to "optimize" their AdWords account. As soon as the word affiliate came up it was like spoiled meat. Replacing the word "affiliate" with some other idiotic made up phrase (I think it was "regional online distributor") suddenly made everything O.K. again. Other friends had similar stories.

Note that the difference between "affiliate" and "regional online distributor" is for all intensive purposes linguistic crap, however it can be the difference between life and death for an online business.

To be fair, the ready availability of feeds to quickly generate sites means that most affiliate sites will be garbage. At some point Google gets sick of fighting the same battles over and over again. Then again, most websites are garbage & only the top x% of anything is going to be great.

At Affiliate Summit last year Google's Frederick Vallaeys basically stated that they appreciated the work of affiliates, but as the brands have moved in the independent affiliates have largely become unneeded duplication in the AdWords ad system. To quote him verbatim, "just an unnecessary step in the sales funnel."

It is worth noting that Google doesn't consider itself "just an unnecessary step in the sales funnel" when they insert themselves as an affiliate.

Should information empires be allowed to discriminate based on nothing more than the business model of competitors?

Spam vs Not Spam

The most recently leaked Google rater document stated

Spammers create spam pages to make money. Sometimes, they make money directly, by placing moneymaking links on the spam page. Here are two types of moneymaking links:

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) ads: Spammers get paid each time ads are clicked on their webpages. Another term for PPC ads is "sponsored links".
Thin Affiliates: Spammers make money when a transaction is completed after the user has clicked through to the merchant's site from their webpages
PPC ads appear on many, many webpages. Some pages with PPC ads are spam, but many pages with PPC ads are not. Pages should not be assigned a Spam flag if they are created to provide information or help to users. Pages are spam if they exist only to make money and not to help users.
Sometimes, spam pages do not have moneymaking links. These spam pages are created to change search engine rankings or even to do harm to users' computers with sneaky downloads.

So in essence, the difference between spam & not spam is if the page is helpful to users.

The rating document takes 130 pages to clearly articulate the difference between what is spam and what is not spam.

But the core ethos in categorization is if it is original & helpful it is not spam unless it is doing something deceptive.

A Minor Exception*

Then arbitrarily Google also sneaks in the "what the hell, if it is affiliate, it is spam" card:

Note: Major cosmopolitan cities are preferred targets for spammers, especially hotel affiliates. Such results should be flagged as Spam, even if they are related to the query and helpful to users. For example, a hotel affiliate page with a list of Chicago hotels may be assigned a rating Relevant, but also receive a Spam flag.

Google is directly going out of its way to attack select competing business models.

Even if the site is quality by any way you slice it they still tell raters to label it as spam if it is a hotel affiliate.

Once again it is worth pointing out that the label affiliate is just an arbitrary label. It could just as well be a "commissioned salesperson."

An Example Market: Books

In our forums one of our members quoted a brilliant book by Karl Polanyi from 1944 which was full of gems like "A so-called self-regulating market economy may evolve into Mafia capitalism — and a Mafia political system"

I searched for that quote & guess what ranked #1?

Google Books of course.

Google's owned & operated affiliate offering in the niche.

The stolen version hosted on Google.com ranks #1...everything else is either spam, unneeded duplication in the marketplace, and/or conjecture that can float up and down as they tweak the algorithms.

To say that the book publishing industry is undergoing pains would be an understatement. But maybe in some weird way Google promoting Google helps the book industry by giving it more avenues to be seen? Maybe they are trying to help out book authors?

The structure of the book industry prevents the book author from getting anything but a small slice of the book's revenues (unless the author is well known and/or they self publish). Markets being what they are, most authors live in obscurity on the long tail. To help supplement their low cut of the revenue pie, some book authors use affiliate links to link to Amazon.com as a purchasing option on their official book websites.

Recently in our forums a member created a thread about a client site being blocked from AdWords because there was an affiliate link on the page for their own book!

Google is The Biggest Online Affiliate

So the author is not allowed to advertise his own work to give you multiple buying options & highlight options which offer her additional compensation, however...

Google is free to steal the copyright work & promote their looted version first
Google can run an affiliate network
Google can double dip in the AdWords auction
Google can give itself affiliate ad units in the SERPs (all their lead generation offers & the CPA-based product ads)
Google can invest in start up affiliate networks (like VigLink) that automatically inserts affiliate links without any editorial discretion from the publisher
Google can invest in networks of similar sites (like Whaleshark Media) that are primarily driven by affiliate links
Google can create paid placement affiliate-driven sites like Boutiques.com & then fold them into Google Product Search without disclosing what is happening to those affiliate placements
Google can become the ultimate online affiliate

And yet the word "affiliate" is a bad word.

The word affiliate is arbitrarily tarnished in the same way that SEO is.

Use another label & if you do the exact same thing it is clean. Craigslist or eBay are not affiliates as they are marketplaces. Wal-Mart & Amazon.com might do drop shipping & have some affiliate promotions on their sites, but they are retailers.

These arbitrary label differences make a big difference to the stability of an online business.

Machine Learning vs a Small Business Killing Machine

Google can claim that they use artificial intelligence and machine learning and are unbiased, but their ranking systems need training sets. And if upon this alleged independent rating affiliates come up as "spam" then how can an affiliate build a sustainable business model?

I know what you are thinking: "Well, Aaron, they can stop being affiliates and move up the value chain."

The problem with that is that as an affiliate I can compare a lot of products in a condensed space, but if I accept payments for products then I likely need to have a page for each product. The issue there is that if you do not have a strong brand and you have lots of pages on your site there is a great chance that the Panda algorithm will torch your website.

At the same time, if you try to go big & thick you have to worry about competing against Google as they buy out vital pieces of the supply chain, create their own affiliate partnerships, steal your content & outrank you with their copy of it, and launch their own affiliate channels & affiliate stores on their websites.

Brand Sites Become Affiliates

One of the things Google mentioned to identify thin affiliates from other merchants is this:

Check to see if the address of the image is the same as the address of the page or if it is the address of a "real" merchant?

Small businesses are getting squeezed out of the search results by Panda. Affiliates are getting torched for not being a "real" merchant.

What is "real"?

At the same time, some of the biggest branded websites that Google promotes are now BECOMING AFFILIATES:

The new items on the website will mostly get to consumers through third-party sellers, which means B&N won't have to carry the expense of inventory. The bookseller will just take a sales commission of 8% to 15% on each item.

What's worse, when brands come under review for spamming, Google says that they already ranked #1 so there is no reason to penalize them. Which is precisely why you can now buy rugs on Barnes & Noble. And it is precisely why you can find dating offers, education offers, jobs, and automotive sections on Excite.com. There is no SEO risk in brand extension for large brands that can do no wrong.

Google puts weight on domain names then suggests that domains can be a spam tool. So in a sense, if you invest in whatever Google trusts and are small you are a spammer. Whereas if you invest in whatever Google trusts and are large you deserve the benefit of the doubt & further promotion.

Sometimes the only difference between the brand and spammer labels is that the brands spam harder.

Brand + Money = Not Spam

For those with money, brand is another SEO tool to buy, and Google will proudly run the affiliate program for your duplicated site if you buy a bankrupt brand & slap a product feed on it.

Google literally ties their relevancy signals to their ad units. Recall that:

Google counts YouTube ad views as organic views
Google suggests that buying their display ads lifts branded search volume (which helps create a branded search signal)
Google put the +1 button in display ads & claims that if you click on it you are recommending the site in the search results (in spite of having only seen an ad & not actually having seen the landing page yet! how hard is it to advertise "free money" and then offer up a landing page which says "oh, but there's a catch"?)

So if you have brand & money you can just flat out buy the "relevancy" signals. Yet if you try to create similar signals without paying Google & without owning a billion Dollar brand you are shunned & labeled as a spammer.

This subjective circular nonsense is getting a bit out of hand.

In summary, we are not SEOs and we are not affiliates.

We are a brand & we will buy retargeting AdWords ads + up our AdWords budget appropriately.

If we rebrand to remove "SEO" from the domain name can we please be added to Google's whitelist? ;)

Categories:

google

Wednesday, October 26, 2011

SEO Book.com

Celebrities Killed The SEO Star

Posted: 26 Oct 2011 12:39 AM PDT

As the co-founder of an SEO Consultancy, my biggest hurdle in business is finding more staff. Clients are lining up at our door, we have no trouble there, it's finding the staff to work with them that becomes the issue. This may not sound like the worst dilemma for a business to face, especially during the current global economic decline, but the causation is a matter of great concern to me as both an SEO and a businessman.

Ayima's company structure is such that only highly skilled SEOs make it through to our interview stage and yet even then, less than 5% meet our skill requirements. This isn't me being picky, misjudging characters or sourcing bad candidates - this is a knowledge pandemic that is spreading through our industry. We've started apprenticeship programs to teach eager candidates from the ground up, but this can take several years to generate the finished article.

After looking back at our past 30 interview candidates, my opinion for the reason behind this issue may not be a popular one. I believe that celebrity SEOs, brands and blogs are feeding a generation of untested and poorly trained search marketers, who pass themselves off as SEO experts. I will of course explain my positioning…

The Pander Update

Some high profile SEO bloggers recently ceased client work and personal projects, in order to appear impartial and trustworthy to their community. This makes sense at first, after-all, who wants to use a link building tool operated by someone working for one of your client's competitors? It does however bring to light 2 much larger issues;

1) a reliance on tertiary information for SEO analysis, and
2) a reliance on search engineers to provide fresh and exclusive information/data.

Some SEO information sites may argue that they have access to the Web Analytics accounts of their partners and that they do study index changes, but nothing replaces the value of following a handful of websites every single day of the year. An absence of "boots on the ground" leads to misinformation and a distancing from the SEO practices and concerns that really matter. This in turn results in an information churn which newbies to the industry naturally perceive as important.

Moving away from servicing clients or running in-house/affiliate projects also causes a financial flux. Revenue no longer relies on problem solving, but on juicy search engine spoilers and interviews. Search Engines are businesses too though and it's in their best interest to only reward and recommend the publishers/communities that tow their line. A once edgy and eager SEO consultancy must therefore transition into a best practice, almost vanilla, publisher in order to pander to the whims of over-eager search reps.

How do we expect the next generation of SEO consultants to analyse a website and its industry competitors, when all they've read about is how evil paid links are and how to tweak Google Analytics?

I could directly link the viewpoints and understandings of some recent SEO candidates back to a single SEO community, word for word. They would be horrified to see the kind of broken and malformed SEOs that their community has produced.

OMG, Check Out My Klout

It's true that social media metrics will become important factors for SEO in the future, but this certainly does not negate the need for a solid technical understanding of SEO. Getting 50 retweets and 20 +1's for a cute cat viral is the work of a 12 year old schoolgirl, not an SEO. If you can't understand the HTML mark-up of a page and how on-page elements influence a search engine, pick up a HTML/SEO book from 2001 and get reading. If you don't know how to optimise site structure and internal linking, read a book on how the web works or even a "UNIX for Dummies" manual. If you're unable to completely map out a competitor website's linking practices, placement and sources, set up a test site and start finding out how people buy/sell/barter/blag/bate for links.

You may be thinking at this point, "Rob, I already know this - why are you telling me?". Well, the sad fact is that many SEOs, with several years of experience at major and minor agencies, fail to show any understanding of these basic SEO building blocks. There are SEOs who can't identify the H1 on a page and that seriously consider "Wordle" and "Link Diagnosis" as business-class SEO tools. It used to be the case that candidates would read Aaron Wall's SEO Book or Dan Thies' big fat Search Engine Marketing Kit from cover-to-cover before even contemplating applying for an entry level SEO role. These days, major agencies are hiring people who simply say that "Content is King" and "Paid Links are Evil", they have at least 50 Twitter followers of course.

"Certified SEO" is NOT the answer

In most other professional industries, the answer would be simple - regulate and certify. This simply does not work for SEO though. I die a little, each time I see a "Certified SEO" proclamation on a résumé, with their examining board consisting of a dusty old SEO company, online questionnaire or a snake-oil salesman. A complete SEO knowledgebase cannot be taught or controlled by a single company or organisation. No one in their right mind would use Google's guide to SEO as their only source of knowledge for instance, just as no self-respecting Paid Search padawan would allow Google to set-up their PPC campaigns. Google's only interest is Google, not you. Popular SEO communities and training providers have their own agendas and opinions too.

I do however concede that some learning should be standardised, such as scientifically proven or verified ranking factors. Just the facts, no opinions, persuasions or ethical stances.

My Plea To You, The Industry

I plea to you, my fellow SEOs, to help fix this mess that we're in. Mentor young marketers, but let them make up their own minds. Put pressure on SEO communities to concentrate on facts/data and not to be scared by controversy or those with hidden agendas. Promote apprenticeship schemes in your company, so that SEOs learn on the job and not via a website. Encourage people to test ideas, rather than blindly believing the SEO teachings of industry celebs and strangers.

An experienced SEO with, what I perceive to be basic skills, isn't too much to ask for is it?

Categories:

internet

Tuesday, October 25, 2011

AboutUs Weblog

Video Helps You Reach Customers

Posted: 24 Oct 2011 10:00 AM PDT

Courtesy of MBTrama at Flickr.com

You don’t need me to tell you: Video is big. Whether it’s on YouTube, Vimeo or other video hosting sites, people are sharing video about all kinds of things, from cooking techniques to car repair to search marketing. Heck, AboutUs has its very own search engine optimization (SEO) videos available on YouTube.

Why are so many people marketing with video? There are a few reasons:

Most people read very little on the Web (though you’d never guess that from the sheer amount of content most companies produce). People scan articles and blog posts very quickly, missing out on a lot of information. But many people actively enjoy watching video, so they’ll stick with a clip that’s a few minutes long….if it’s reasonably interesting.
Video is easy to share, and it does get shared. A good video has the potential to spread quickly from one friend or colleague to a huge group…and beyond. (Notice I said a “good” video.)
Search engines notice videos, and notice which ones are searched for and clicked on. YouTube is now the second-largest search engine in the world, after Google (which owns YouTube, by the way), and its search data is used not just by Google, but probably by other search engines to help determine what’s popular. Remember, links and clicks on those links are like votes for a website. So videos linking back to your site are potentially powerful drivers of both traffic and improvement in your search rankings.

This morning I found a few useful articles about video for business owners I thought I’d share:

Anum Hussain of HubSpot points out the nine video marketing mistakes we should avoid. My two favorites: forgetting a call to action (why did you post this video, anyway?) and making videos that are too long.
ReelSEO published a guest article by Neil Davidson in which he challenges five marketers to come up with a business that wouldn’t benefit from online video. For the record, they couldn’t….Neil tells you how each business, however unlikely it may seem, could promote itself effectively through video.
And, backing into some useful tips, Cindy Ratzlaff of Business Insider offers the Top 10 Reasons Not To Include Video in Brand Marketing. Sure, it’s tongue-in-cheek, and you’ll find a few good tips here to get you going with your own videos.

AboutUs has published a few articles about video marketing as well, all of them targeted to small business:

Video Marketing 101 - Eleven tips (just because 5 or 10 or whatever seems awfully random to me) for making videos efficiently, and making sure they’re useful to people.
Planning Your Small Business Video – Things to think about if the very idea of making a video is just too daunting, by videomaker Amy Dubin.
How To Add Your Logo to Your Video – Practical help from Scott Olson, a veteran marketer and entrepreneur.
Record Video Interviews with Skype – More practical help from Scott, who’s built a business out of video interviews at FounderBuzz.com.

You’ll find plenty of clearly written, helpful articles about SEO and search marketing for small business and entrepreneurs in the Learn section of AboutUs.org. Looking for help with something we haven’t covered yet? Write to us: Editor@AboutUs.org.