Video Optimization with Open Graph Tags

Many of us might be wondering about how a video snippet is visible on normal organic search results. It’s a hard dream for all the online marketers to optimize their video and hence it can visible in video searches. However, a few videos that always finds slots on Google’s web search results. Have you ever thought why these videos appear on web search results? It can be because of “Open Graph Protocol”.

Open Graph Protocol is rich code standards that enable a webpage to become a rich object in social graph. Hence, a webpage that have open graph will show the rich object as a thumbnail on various places like search engine results, Facebook posts, twitter shares etc. 

Since 2008, all online marketing brains were thinking a lot to utilize the Google’s Blended Search results to promote their video on search results. I personally feel like Open Graph can make a video eligible to participate on web search results. It’s just a probability that it supports video to appear on search, but not guaranteed!. 

So let us look at how certain videos promoted and certain not on Google search results:

Thumbnail View of Video on SERP Results

Here you can see that the #2, #3 holds more eyes catchy that the #1 slot. It gives a great impact on users and hence gets clicks on those two videos than the ranked #1 search result.

If you look into the source code of these YouTube videos, you can see the below codes:

Open Graph Tags for Video SEO

These codes are the open graph video tags that enable a webpage to thumbnail its rich media content on search results. Remember again, it’s just a make your video/webpage eligible to participate on Google search... Nothing guaranteed.

The Fundamentals:

og:url - The canonical URL of your object that will be used as its permanent ID in the graph

og:title - The title of your object as it should appear within the graph, e.g., "Kung Fu".

og:description - A one to two sentence description of your object.

og:type - The type of your object, e.g., "video.movie". Depending on the type you specify, other properties may also be required.

og:image - An image URL which should represent your object within the graph.

og:video - A URL to a video file that complements this object.

og:video:width - The number of pixels wide.

og:video:height - The number of pixels high.

og:site_name - If your object is part of a larger web site, the name which should be displayed for the overall site. e.g., "YouTube"

How to Add It to Your Webpage?

<meta property="og:video" content="http://example.com/your-video-file.extension" />

<meta property="og:video:secure_url" content="https://secure.example.com/your-video-file-name.extension" />

<meta property="og:video:type" content="application/your-video-application" />

<meta property=ög:image”content=” http://example.com/your-image-file.extension”

<meta property="og:video:width" content="xxx" />

<meta property="og:video:height" content="xxx" />

Bottom Line:

Optimize your video by normal basic optimization procedures along with open graph tags. Surely, open graph not alone the playmaker to get a thumbnail view on Google SERP.  Let’s get clear with all the negligible steps and execute all to optimize our video well. We can’t predict what search engines care for…!

Related Articles:

Beware Of Negative SEO Tactics! How Can You Defend It?

Scope of Google’s Knowledge Graph

Beware Of Negative SEO Tactics! How Can You Defend It?

We are hearing a lot about Negative SEO. Many discussions, questions & answers, debates and many more.. Even many webmasters lost their sleep on this issue. It’s  a big issue for all kinds of leading website on their market niche. In fact, it’s really a big threat to whole SEO practise itself. There are many negative seo specialists out there to bring down your competitive website. 

The idea behind this practise is simple. Google wants website to follow some guidelines. And the websites those who are not following can be downgraded by Google in their search result pages. By keeping this in mind, if we engage our competitor’s website against Google search guidelines, then obviously that website get de-promoted and hence, the webmaster own website will automatically promoted higher. It’s so insane and ugly!!!!

Many negative seo tactics can sue your website. A few of them are:

1. Intentionally creating back links from bad or spam neighborhoods.
2. Create a spam website that looks similar to competitor’s website with exact content and replica of pages with look and feel as well. However, the URLs will be different (but a close similarity) and do a permanent 301 re-direction to competitor’s website. This can surely affect in search traffic and hence a downgrade in performance.
3. Infect the competitor’s website with virus, malware and other attacks that can reduce the faith of website’s credibility and security. As a result of it, Google avoids spam websites and links.
4. Making competitor’s content duplicate. This can be done if you can create a new page with competitor’s content and try to get index fast before your competitor gets. Whenever your competitor’s website makes any updates, it becomes a duplicate content. Hence, surely, competitor’s new page (the original content) never index.
   

 

Solutions:

There are no proper steps to defend it. The only thing you can do is, keep monitoring your website, and do your action against it as soon as possible. Negative SEO can prevent only if you observe your website closely. A few things that may help you are:

Google & Bing Webmaster Tools:

These tools can tell you about your website statistics and performance. It shows malware or any injected threats on your website. It gives you an idea about your site back links as well as the domains that linked to your website. If you closely watch these domains, you can avoid the bad neighbourhood links. Even you can monitor the keywords (terms) that being linked with your site. This can make your day easier for sure.

Alerts:

You can set up Google Alerts. It helps you to get an instant update on the links where people mention your website. Through this way, you can track the websites on which your website mentions.

Google Analytics alert can notify you with your custom alert service such as increment in traffic, sudden bounce rate increase etc. Check the video for more about Google Analytics Alerts.

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Monitor Your Back links Frequently:

Use some reliable back links tools and monitor back links on daily basis. This can help you to identify soon if any negative seo hits. There can be some sudden increment in total number of back links. Therefore, you can investigate it and hence can take sudden action on it by reporting to Google & Bing for avoiding this bad back links.

So open your eyes always and monitor it immediately…. No prevention on negative SEO, but it only cures. But how fast you are, there it matters!!!!

Scope of Google’s Knowledge Graph

Google’s latest update to their search algorithm was “Knowledge graph”. Google claims that it can guide you what exactly a user is looking for. They are also telling that they almost have around 500 millions of information collected already to make this “latent semantic search” better. So let’s hope we get a better results and more related information in future. However, I got a few questions raised by my mind about the algorithm flow:

Terms Relationship

Question 1:

How Google can relate things each other? What are all the parameters they can relate on a particular object?

Let’s take “cell phones” as an example. Are they going to display me various latest mobile phones with the prizes alone or just a few big brand products? Will Google help me to analyze which is the best featured cell phone among others? Will they show me these products & it’s reviews as a normal online product website does? If so, then what will be the role of a normal shopping website? Will it affects in their traffic or business because of this Google product lists???

How Google will relate if I search terms like “I”, “Me”, “sex”, “Google” and name of people etc?

Question 2:

Where the Google Ads Goes???

Normally, Google shows their paid listings (Adwords) on the right panel of the search result page. And Google get big bucks from these advertisements. Therefore, once the knowledge graph comes into picture, are they going to stop their PPCs?? I don’t think so (How can Google stops their main source of income, right?). Will they shift these advertisements into a new position or area of the search page?? We have to wait and watch it.

Question 3:

Organic search results prominence reduces?

As soon as we hit the search button, a suggestion box will appear on the right panel of the search result page. Since, the attention completely goes on the right panel box results; users hardly notice the organic search results by the Google. It may affect the traffic to those websites that even placed in the top results. Previously, Google Ads were displayed in a less prominent way that all the user attention goes on the organic results first. But when we consider the suggestion box that appears on the right panel, it was so big and congested with lots of information with images. Surely, it attracts a user first than the natural results.

Question 4:

Only Wiki results?

If I search for a celebrity, Google shows their information and related other celebrities those who are similar to my search. It shows their history, achievements, incidents and other personal or academically related stuffs. All these information are available only in Wikipedia, but not on other websites or sources. So how do I get other websites that might have more updated information on these celebrities? Can I land on their official websites directly from these suggestion boxes??

Conclusion:

One thing is clear that it takes minimum one year to get improved or accurate results of searches. It works mainly based on interests of the users. Therefore, Google can track user’s interest and hence they can utilize this information on the Google Ads (PPCs) especially in re-marketing ads. Hence, they can offer a better service for their paid advertisers. So intelligent, ah!!!
Author: Hashim J

Top 12 Parameters to Ensure Quality of Content – Post Panda Optimization Technique

When SEO evolved, there is a term evolved spontaneously called “Quality Content”. What exactly it is? Are there any standards that can compare it? If yes, where it is? Or who knows those parameters?

If you read some seo article or engage in any forum conversation, everybody is talking about content. From SEO guru’s to a lower level seo executive, all are talking about the ‘quality content’. “SEO is all about quality content, It should be relevant, it should be search engine friendly, blah blah blah”…..

Panda Effects on Web Content

However, no body speaks about what are all the metrics that can define about the quality of content.

Questions like:

1. Which content is proved as a quality content and why it treating so?
2. Who knows those quality parameters?
3. What are all those quality parameters?
4. If you write quality content, can anyone make sure that it gets all benefit from Google?

No answer from any experts. In fact, all know that only a quality and unique content can only survive the recent Google updates such as Panda Effects and Penguin Update.

Read more on:

Why Panda Update Was So Obvious for Google?

Penguin Update: Why Google Wants to Target Webspam in Search Results?

So is it a rocket science?? Why all experts and even Matt Cutt simply speak a lot about content quality? Or are they creating hype about it?

Only Google & GOD can answer about it. According to Matt Cutt, Panda can target low quality websites in terms of bad content it seems. And seriously, nobody knows which falls under good quality and which into bad quality. Since search engine optimization is a world with full of guessing and reverse engineering concept, I can suggest some valuable points that can be affect your website content quality. Those are:

1. Write content without spelling mistakes
2. Write it in simple English [Hence people around the globe can read & understood easily].
3. Use appropriate words or synonyms in the sentence.
4. Avoid jargon or other slang that can understood by a few group of people.
5. Sentence structure should be outstanding [Use Flesch-Kincaid grade level to measure it].
6. There won’t be any grammatical errors in the sentence.
7. Convey the message straightly without beating around the bush.
8. Try to add some image or other info graphics that can convey the message directly.
9. Distribute your content in paragraphs.
10. Use your keywords reasonable number of times in your content [don’t stuff it].
11. Ask a review from another person who can read and point out the mistakes about the content.
12. Check the keyword proximity on it.

These are a few suggestions of me that I believe it can make a huge impact on the quality of content.

These points are taken from my experience and common sense. Please share your thoughts as well. I may miss some important parameter that can impact on the quality. So feel free to share your suggestions and feed backs on it.

Why Panda Update Was So Obvious For Google?

Google is refining its search quality frequently. Hence, search metrics that a website can pass through is becoming tougher and competitive. After Google Panda update, many websites dropped in its search ranking and lost a huge amount of traffic. It’s becoming a very difficult to maintain traffic and search rankings. Why Google is so desperate to introduce new update in algorithm?

Before Panda:

Google is trying to include new parameters or metrics to evaluate a website standard. Previously it was just page rank algorithm and back Link concept that decided a website’s visibility. Google relied on traditional search quality tactics to measure a website. Hence, SEO guys were rocking with all white, grey and black hat techniques. They submitted the website links everywhere on the web they can. They did much tricky stuffs that absolutely dribbled search bots and got the exact results that they were planned to. A few of those tricks were:

1.      Keyword Stuffing
2.      Hidden texts with links
3.      Doorway pages
4.      Content duplication
5.     Aggressive Link Submission
6.      Link Exchange
7.      Paid Link Services
8.      Blog networks
9.      Parked Domains

Many other tricks and techniques helped these websites to beat the search algorithm so easily. It was cakewalk job for SEO guys to place a brand new website into #1 position in search engine results within a month or two. There were certain services that intentionally selling back links with a minimal cost to increase visibility.  Hence, at particular point of time, SEO was all about submissions. In between, they even started BOMBING.  People appointed to monitor respective competitors and started de-promoting these competitors. These smart boys were totally mixed the search results according to the wish.

Therefore, the result was quiet predictable. Websites that hired SEO services was placed on the top results of Google for their targeted keywords regardless of the quality of service.  Even many spam websites that just manipulated certain parameters in such a way that they can rank well on search engine within a short period. Eventually, Google’s search quality had started reducing. All the qualified websites were left down on the search rankings. It became a big head ache to Google in terms of quality of their service.    

Solution:

Google wants to reduce the importance of back link concept to crack down spam results. Hence, Google search quality team started thinking to find other parameters that can substitute the back link concepts. Finally, they decided to go for user centric approach. How a user land up a webpage and whether they like the page or not, are they spending more time on the site or not etc.

Later, they listed out certain points that make a normal user happy and hence they will stick with the service. It’s very common belief that if the service of a website is fantastic, then users will find them so easily and will stick with the service for a quiet long time. Even in terms of Google search algorithms also, they decided to go with a user’s point of view. They created many other parameters that can ensure user’s belief and collided into a single term called “Panda”.

Result:

Panda affected websites

• Many websites experienced a sudden drop in their organic search traffic
• Lost Page Ranks and Keyword Rankings
• Found many of the low quality websites
• Websites with much advertisement lost its importance
• It changed the definition of SEO
• Penalized paid blog networks
• Increased importance of Social Media Involvement & mentions
• Websites those who were into a business/service since very long time got advantage in terms of SERP rankings

Now What Next for SEO?

Since, search metrics are changing frequently, web marketers has to step very carefully. At present, whatever they do online, can also influence their work. Submitting your links on many websites and driving traffic is not going to work out much and all SEOs should find out a new way to tackle this situation. However, all hope is that Google will surely support those who believe in “white hat”. So happy SEO…