There is an interesting debate going on at highrankings.com about whether it’s better to host your own video’s or use Youtube and embed the video into your page.

I have always recommended to my customers that they use YouTube or Google Video to host their videos and embed them into their pages. There are a couple of reasons for this. My customers tend to be smaller businesses and their hosting plans don’t include a huge amount of bandwidth or the ability to stream their content.

Most every business who post a video hopes that it get very popular and is a great promotion for their site, but if you get a good Digg, Stumble or some other sharing service recommending your video, you can quickly use up all of your bandwidth. Before you even know that it’s all gone your site may be down for quite a while and then you’ll probably have to buy more.
I don’t believe Google will ever run out of bandwidth.

The next issue is streaming. If you just post a video on your site the entire thing must be downloaded by your visitor before it will start to play. Many of them will leave your site before that if it’s a large video. To start playing the video as soon as the visitor arrives at your page requires a streaming server. Many web hosts don’t even offer that and true video streaming in any form can be expensive.
This is not an issue with most video hosting services.

There are also some some advantages to self-hosting. You can view the debate on

Video: Embedded Youtube Vs. Self-hosting – High Rankings Search Engine Optimization Forum

One of the best ways to move your site up the search engine results page for your keywords is to have incoming links from outside websites. The higher ranking and more authoritative these sites are the better it is for you.

The problem that people and companies with new sites run into is how to get these popular sites to link to them.  Unless you are already a household name there are few authoritative sites that will easily share their “link juice” with an unknown, right?

That’s not necessarily true. I was reading a post today by Dana Larson on the Online Marketing Blog called 5 Link Building Tips for New Websites. It offers some great ideas on where a new site owner can get links from authoritative sites that will help you get started.

The post and commenters had some good ideas that you should check out, but it also made me think of some more. For example

• If you have an account on a social networking site like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. you can easily get a link to your site from there. While it’s true that most of their content is locked up behind your password and Google can’t read it, if you have a link to your site on your profile page and select “make it available to everyone”, you have a link to your website from some of the highest ranking sites there are today.
• If you belong to a group like a networking group, or a professional group many of them will give you a link as well.

For more tips read 5 Link Building Tips for New Websites

I have a page on my site with some of my favorite site designs that are showing up on the web. These are not my sites, but they are the kinds of designs that I like in a website. There are different reasons that I picked these site designs, they all look good and are clear and easy to use. Sometimes I just like a picture or the name. Some of the sites are not in English and I still know what they are about.

The newest one is called The Idiotic Adventures of Philippe and Pierre.

The other day I wrote about not using pictures of words in place of real words on your web page. Well, here’s an example of a site where it works well. The site is for a cartoon so you want the text to look cartoonish, but there are alt tags on every image that tells the search engines (and human visitors with images turned off) what the picture is about. This included the navigation, but even with the image rollovers for navigation it uses CSS that search engines can read and not some kind of scripting that is not easy for them to read.

Visit The Idiotic Adventures of Philippe and Pierre

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I answered a question the other day from someone who was wondering why they were not getting any traffic from Google. When I looked at their first page I could see right away what the problem was. The entire page was one big picture. It was chopped up into smaller slices to help it load faster, but there was no text at all.

When I mentioned this they said that there were plenty of words on the page and in a way there were. What they had were pictures of words on the page and not actual text. Unfortunately they didn’t know the difference.

These are words. You type them one letter at a time into the page. You can select all of them with your cursor or just part, then copy and paste them into a text editor like notepad.

This is a picture of words. You do type the letters in when you are creating the images in GIMP or PhotoShop, but once you save it as a picture the letters and words are no longer available to you (or anyone) to select as words any more.

It’s important to know the difference because when the search engines visit your page and they see this picture, they see something like this
<img src=”http://www.lillicotch.com/images/words.jpg” width=”240″ height=”170″/>
You are permitted to put an “alt tag” in this where you can write a description of the picture (and are encouraged to do so), but because it’s not visible to all it’s not trusted the same as if it were actual text that everyone can see.

There are times when you want to do this. Clearly the letters can be much more fancy this way and you are limited quite a bit with plain text as to what will work on a web page, so it may be OK for some places on your page.

Search engines are also getting better at “reading pictures”, but there is still not a good reason to put the main text of your page in a format that is still hard or impossible for search engines to read.

SEO For Images On Your Site

I noticed a discussion on LinkedIn today about whether you blogs URL should look like this www.myblog.blogspot.com or like this www.mydomain.com/blog.

Some people couldn’t understand the difference and others didn’t think that it mattered. Well, there is a difference and it does matter.

The Difference…
When you are looking to see who owns a website the only part of the domain name that tells you who the site belongs to is the part that comes right before the .com (.org, .net, etc.).
That means that if your URL looks like…
MyDomainName.Blogspot.com
or
Blogspot.com/MyDomainName
that page is on the Blogspot website.

If your URL looks like this…
Blogspot.MyDomainName.com
or
MyDomainName.com/Blogspot
that content is on your site and you have complete control over it (or you should)

Why It Matters…
The old saying with SEO used to be “Content Is King” and while that may not be as true as it used to be, new content on your site is still very important for a couple of reasons and it’s true for human visitors as well as the search engines.

First, you need to have words on your site that the search engines can find, read and then know what your site is all about. The more words that you have on your site the more chance that someone will find you. Sometimes for things that you would not have even considered. I’ve mentioned before that if you are lucky enough to get good relevant comments on your posts, that’s even more content for your site that you don’t even have to write.

Next, one of the many factors that search engines use when rating your site is how often that you add new content. They do this because they think (like your human visitors) “all right I’ve seen their site, why would I go back again?”
You would probably only go back more than once or twice if there was something new to look at each time that you did. So, the more times that you add new content the better that you should rank.

You have worked very hard to

• Write new content on a regular basis
• Passed along your knowledge and insights
• Have others add even more in the way of comments

Why would you put this on someone else’s site and let them have all the benefits without any of the work?

There are also a few reasons why you shouldn’t have a blog on your site

Read Should My Business Have A Blog?

There are many businesses that don’t benefit much from visitors that are far away finding their site. Things like pizza shops or car dealers who may get a tiny percent of their sales from a thousand miles away, but the vast majority come from a mile or two radius.

In addition any business will benefit from additional sales and many people will trust a business that is close to them more than one that is far away. Having people find you on a local search these days is much more effective than buying ads in printed directories or even newspapers. It can also be much less expensive or even free.

Here’s a great post on the subject by Ron Jones at the Search Engine Watch. He has some great ideas and links to some wonderful tools to help your business get found on a local search.

Read Local Search 101, Part 1

I can’t tell you how many sites that I have seen and made where the owner puts up a site and expects the world (with billions of web pages to visit) to beat a path to their door. They never make any changes or even look at it and then wonder why it fails to live up to their expectations.

I had a customer tell me the other day that they were just not getting any hits. I know that what they really wanted was more customers and sales, but he confused hits and traffic with sales.

I asked him just how did he know that? I was pretty sure that he didn’t even know what his visitor traffic to his site was. I went to his visitor logs and saw that the site was getting almost 300 unique visitors a month. Some of those are search engines and blog spammers, but most are visitors. That’s not a huge number, but I’m sure it was more than he suspected.

So the real question is if there are visitors to the site why aren’t there any leads. I’m sure only one or two more a month will make quite a difference.

The questions should be…

• If I am getting 300 visitors to my site why are they not contacting me?
• Are they from out of the country or out of the area?
• What pages are they most interested in?
• On those pages do I have some sort of a “call to action” asking them to contact me?

Here’s where a blog or newsletters posted on your site can really help you gain relevant traffic that converts to customers. The first thing that you need to do is to review your website stats on a regular basis. Make an appointment with yourself to do this, it’s important.

• See where your visitors are coming from.
• What search terms they are using to find you?
• Can you include those words and similar ones in future posts?
• Are they being referred from another site?
• If so, which ones?
• Can you get links to you on more of their pages?
• Write more content that they may be interested in linking to?
• Can you find other similar sites that will also link to you?

Once you know what people are looking for you can provide more of it. Think of your blog posts like commercials, but not too self serving. Your visitors want to know what’s in it for them.
Talk about the issues that you and your customers are having and how you can help them.
Then be sure and check your stats to see which ones are popular and write more.

Be sure to include in your post a call to action. Something like
“If you are dealing with this issue I would be happy to work with you on solving it. Contact me by posting a comment on this page, emailing me directly or call my cel (412) xxx-xxxx right now.

So taking my own advise here, if you have a website that just seems to be siting there and not working for you please contact me and I would be happy to provide a free analysis of your current site.

There is also much more good free information on this site. Here’s a recommendation

What Good Are 1,000,000 Visitors If They Don’t Like Your Content?

A customer recently asked me to remove some of the links on their “exchange links” page. They said “If I am not on their site – I don’t want theirs on mine.”

I wrote back that it really doesn’t work that way any more. That they should consider getting rid of their links page.

It used to be that having these kind of links would help you get better rankings on the search engines, but they have long figured out that it’s all they are there for so they don’t pay much attention to them any more. They are called “link farms” and some people even say they hurt your rankings.

Go ahead and give people links, but do it in your blog and only one or two a post. Think in terms of helping your human visitors and the search engines will recognize this and reward you.

Only give links to sites that you recommend yourself. If you wouldn’t use them yourself don’t link to them no matter what they promise you.

If you link out freely to quality sites that your visitors will get something out of the inbound links will take care of themselves without your asking for them. Others will value what you have and send visitors your way because you provide something of value to them.

read this post for more info
Do You Want To Exchange Links?

When I first started this business I had some business cards made.
I didn’t give it much thought and threw them together pretty quickly.

I’ve been talking about new cards for quite a while now and one of the members of Business Leads Exchange Networking Group that I attend is a graphic designer and illustrator named Dan Szwedko. I know Dan pretty well from the meetings and I like his work. What I thought I’d do is to get a fresh perspective on my card design.

One of Dan’s promotion ideas is that if you’re only printing on one side of your business card you’re also wasting valuable advertising space that you already own. He has a special on two sided business cards.

I gave Dan my logo, my company colors and the text that I wanted on my card. Those of you who read this blog know that I like black text on a white background. It’s always the easiest to read.

I let Dan know this as well and being an artist Dan wanted to add some color to my card. I told him to use my colors any way that he wanted.

He sent me this back…

I must admit that I think the color definitely gives it some style and looking at it I realized that if we flipped the gradient background and put the tan on the top, all of my contact info will still be black on white.
Same with the back.

I really like the ghosted logo Dan added on the back so I kept that and added a bit more text.
I am very happy with the final product.

If you would like to take advantage of my freind Dan’s special of 1000 two sided cards for $47.95, plus a flat fee of Only $25.00 for layout. Just visit his site dsgraphics.net. It’s quality work at a great price and he will even include Free Shipping!

When designing a new site I usually don’t write the content. My feeling is that no one knows your business like you do, but I will offer some help if needed.

One of my new customers had this question, “When I re-write my first page, would it help to include any information so the search engines will find it?” I replied with some basic information that, I hope, was to their point.

Absolutely! You want to place your the keywords or search terms that you want to be found for on your page. Every page should be writen with this in mind, although your human visitor should be your first priority.

Keywords can and should be groups of words. Action words, not just “widgets”, but “buy widgets” or “buy widgets in Pittsburgh PA”. Without the quotes, of course. Using multiple words like this will get you better rankings for those terms than just using single, more generic terms that are much harder to rank well for. It will also get you more qualified visitors that are more likely to want to buy what you have to sell.

You also want the most important keywords in the headlines. You want a main headline for the page and a smaller headline for each paragraph or section that you write. Have your keyword once in the headline and once or twice (no more) in the body text.

Use these keyword suggestion tools to search for popular search terms. No sense optimizing your pages for something no one is searching for. You also want to pick terms that are relevant to your business. Why have visitors come to your site that are not interested in what you have to offer?

There is much more to know about this, but I think it’s a pretty good start.