Hello NCs
SEO was not something I knew much about before starting my Ning site. I've picked it up along the way, with help from some NCs here like SoaringEagle, but it's pretty much trial and error and keeping an eye on Matt Cutt's blog over at Google so you're up to speed with what Google likes.
Anyway, one simple thing I would recommend to all NCs is to trawl YouTube, Vimeo and other video sharing sites for content related to your niche and put them on your site.
Here's what I do when embedding a Youtube video on my site:
1. On the YouTube video page, click the share button
2. Click the Embed Button
3. Choose 'Use old embed code'
4. Copy the embed code and paste it into your Ning 'Add Video' embed box and press save.
5. IMPORTANT! Change the title and desciption of the video so that it is unique from that displayed on YouTube, .ie the information that Ning brings over on an embed. Google likes original content/page titles etc. It obviously doesn't need to be wildly different and the message should be the same but at least try some minor changes.
6. Tag the video accordingly and make one of those tags the same as the video title (use double quotes "for multiple word tags").
7. Save.
I've had success with this. For example, if I google "Accident claims crushing death" (yup, cheery, I know) then the video that I embedded on my site appears top of Google ahead of the law firm's website that has the video on it and ahead of the YouTube page from which I originally got it.
It's taken time to see results but it's worked long-term. Try it out, it could get you more traffic.
SP
Replies
Very simple :-)
just curious... why the old embed code?
just curious... why the old embed code? (x2) This old embed code is for flash only, so why it is good?
you could skip that if you wanted but I have a long-standing issue with the iframe embed on YouTube because I never get the thumbnails. check out my home page activity feed or video page to see what I mean. I either get the pointless default video icon or YouTube logo. I did send this in as a ticket and Ning told me to use the old embed code (although I realise this looks bad on iOs).
What to do?
thanks - yeah, and the default icon is ugly. thanks for this tip too!
I've reopened my ticket on this because thinking about it it's pretty unacceptable. Ticket 00747785 in case anyone from Ning is looking :-)
Very nice tip SP. However, I'm not sure about Google SEO because in my network a person has uploaded a video called "Saumya Rai enter Grand finale DID Lil Msters 5thAug.2012". When I checked google analytic report, many people are hitting the link from google search. It looks like good organic traffic hit.
great tip.have been doing this,nice to know it works