Google's Quality Update - Is Your Website Ready?

For several years, I've enjoyed a partnership with the fine folks at SiteQuest Technologies, the creators of a tool called SQWatcher. While originally developed to help regulated businesses (like banks, where I spend a majority of my time) automatically archive page content and updates, with the recent announcement of Google's "Quality Update," one of the added benefits of the system is that it's looking at ALL of the website resources - and now provides even more value for users given the Google announcement.

Internet Marketing for Community Banks (YouTube Test)

Greetings everyone. I recently posted a blurb via my Ping.fm account about getting to #1 in Google out of over 550,000 search results for the term "Internet Marketing for Community Banks". I did a YouTube video* (a pretty poor one, actually, but I was in "training" and kind of rushed through it), yesterday and optimized it for this phrase long tail keyword phrase. I took a screen shot yesterday before submitting the video and doing some "behind the scenes" social bookmarking activities and, as expected, I was nowhere to be found.

Well, after uploading my video and completing the social bookmarking process, I was amazed to find that my video had been picked up by AOL Video and was in the #1 position for the keywords I optimized. Amazing! Granted, the video could have been a LOT better (the audio wasn't even working) and some of the screen resolution was not allowing for all the text on the slides to be seen. But, the thing to take out of this is that it WORKED and was able to get to the #1 spot.

Now, given the quality of the video I suspect that I won't last long in the #1 spot, which is fine. However, if I had taken more time to actually put some effort into the video, making sure the audio was playing and the resolution settings and it would likely stick around for a while.

So, as you can see, video is a pretty powerful way to enhance the effectiveness of search engine optimization (SEO). So, when I return from training and have a bit more time to play around with the power that I have learned, I'm looking forward to what the possibilities are for not only my business personally, but my clients as well. I already have a few that have approached me about using video on their sites and how it can help to connect them with their customers. What they are not even thinking of is the powerful "organic" search results that can result.

Until next time.
Eric Cook

*I uploaded another video to my YouTube channel that I think you'll enjoy more than the test one that I did yesterday. While I'm not expecting this new video to reach #1 Google status, (it's one of Ryder when he was a pup playing with his litter mates and a potbelly pig), I suspect you'll enjoy it.

Ryder and Potbelly Pig