Using Video To Promote Your Web Site

'Back in the day, if you wanted to get your website ranking highly in search engines all you had to do was cram the pages of your site with as many “relevant” keywords as possible. 
 
So, you have a web site, maybe you have several web sites or blogs. Without traffic, they are lonely little ghost towns nobody visits – the internet contains literally trillions of web sites and a great many of them get almost no traffic at all.
 
You need traffic, everybody needs it and without it none of your banners, or ads would generate any revenue for your business, and, lets get this straight, running a successful website is a business – if it isn’t earning money, then it’s losing money. 
 
In those hazy old days of the Internet it was relatively easy – you would just stuff lots of vaguely relevant keywords in your pages, use copied content, throw in some Meta tags and that would do it… Some people still believe they can get away with it today, but the last few Google updates have put an end to all that.
 
That kind of SEO actually causes your pages to be de- indexed by Google and we don’t want that…
This whole culture of SEO has given people some dangerous misconceptions that need to be put to bed once and for all. The best way to understand it all is to try to see what Google is about and what its actual purpose is…
 
So, what is Google's purpose? 
 
Google is there to make a profit! They do so by maintaining their popularity as the world’s Number One search engine by ensuring that when you search for anything, you will always get high quality, relevant, unique content. Not spam, copied content or irrelevant garbage. So, if you want your web site to feature in the first page of Google results for a given search phrase, your content has to be excellent – relevant, unique, readable.
 
That means that whoever is producing this content has to actually know quite a lot about their given subject, be able to write well and maintain a high standard on a regular basis. Not only do you need good content, you need to be posting more and more of it, regularly, to be seen as interesting, worth reading, valuable.
 
You either need to write it yourself, or pay a professional writer or copywriter to write it for you. If you do decide to hire a writer, look for examples of their work, see if they have a web site, look for reviews and testimonials before engaging their services. You may already have content on your web site that needs proofreading, or some of it may need rewriting because it has been copied, or because it was copied from somewhere to begin with.
 
 
In some cases, web site owners choose to follow SEO tactics that at best, are out of date, at worst are actually detrimental to the site’s ranking. But there are other ways to get more visitors to your web pages that don’t involve constantly writing new articles and page. Sure, you need content and it needs to be high quality, but just content on its own is not going to get you targeted traffic. 
 
There are a number of very smart ways to get your pages seen, like for instance, producing a YouTube video; you don’t even have to have a camera, you can take your existing content and re purpose it by breaking it up into short paragraphs, and paste them into PowerPoint, make a presentation, add a voiceover, maybe a slick opening splash screen (you can get these produced for very little at  Fiverr.com) and upload it to YouTube. Make sure you mention your web site at least once in the video, end with a call to action and have your page link in the description under the video.
 
I recommend starting your description with your web site’s URL, (don’t forget to include http:// before the www. in lower case letters so it will be clickable) then write a description of what the video is about and end with the URL again. Also remember to add relevant search tags, these can be entered in the box immediately below the description box and are comma separated.
 
If you go for a more personal “talking head” type of video review, you should try the new transcribe option, (go to subtitles and CC) it allows you to type in exactly what is being said in the video and it pauses every time you type. It is far better than allowing the YouTube voice recognition system to do it as it is very rarely readable.. This is good for two reasons; one is it makes the video much more accessible for deaf viewers and it actually helps your video to rank in search engines, particularly Google, who own YouTube and so give it preference in searches. It is MUCH easier to get a video to rank highly in searches than a web site or page.
 
Videos convert viewers into buyers better than text content – the combination of the two is simply the way companies market on the Internet these days and it is just expected that if you have a web site where you are offering a product or service that you should have a video or two that explains what your product does, what problem it solves, why it is worth buying, how to use it, tips and tricks etc. A very powerful technique is to publish reviews of types of products that includes your competitors’ products and that goes into detail about their relative features and concludes with an endorsement of your product in what seems to be an impartial review..
 
Another style that is increasingly popular is unboxing videos. People like to see the product they are thinking of buying being unboxed and tested out – it could work well for your promotions, as can on- page desktop screen recordings as the reviewer looks at the pages of your web site and talks about them. People respond to these videos and it attracts new visitors who are already warmed to your site pages and know what style of content to expect when they click through.
 
The same goes for training courses, ebooks, in fact any kind of digital downloadable product; you may need to buy the product in order to have a copy to review, but in some cases the vendor will actually give you a review copy for you to use as it is worth it to them in order to increase their sales figures and click through rates, if you are promoting/reviewing a digital product for another company you can earn affiliate commissions from sites like ClickBank and JVZoo, they have new products coming out all the time and they all pay commissions on sales.
 
Video should definitely be a part of your web site marketing strategy, it is a tried and tested formula and a great deal can be accomplished in just an hour or two with software that may already be sitting on your desktop. If you use a PC then check out windows Movie Maker, there are loads of YouTube tutorials on how to use this free video production software and, if you use a Mac then the same applies to Imovie.
 
It is very likely your competitors are already using video to increase their company’s visibility on the web, so it is important that you watch their videos, take notes and look for ways you can improve on and outclass your competitors. Once you have a video on YouTube, or one of the other video sharing sites, you can embed a link to it on your web pages and share it on your social media network. One well- made video can do a lot to help in your promotions and to increase the visibility of your brand.