The Future of Website Traffic
I had a mid-life crisis the other day about my Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy for my website business traffic.
SEO, as you might know, simply refers to getting your website to rank at the top of a search engine’s listing for a specific term.
For example, if you type in “fat loss workouts” in the google search bar, you should see my site come up 4th. (I think it used to be higher, but it has slipped down.)
On the other hand, I have a youtube video at the top of the page, called “Big 5 Fat Burning Exercises”.
And so that’s what worries me.
Here’s the deal.
1) I don’t really enjoy doing video.
2) But video is getting top rankings for search terms.
3) Therefore, I’m worried I will have to spend the rest of my career cranking out videos – which pains me to think about.
So to get to the bottom of this, I went to our SEO expert, Rick Porter from RickPorter.org, and asked him:
a) With the web moving towards more video, how is this going to change the future of SEO?
b) Are all the search results eventually going to show video?
c) Will there be room for “old dinosaurs” like me who hate doing video and just want to create written content?
d) If you do see a shift towards “all video” results, when do you think this will happen?
Here are Rick Porter’s answers:
“There is a lot of emphasis on video nowadays as many people in this generation do not like to read and have a very short attention span.
“But video is never going to completely replace written content, and it is a long way off from dominating the search engines in the relevancy department.
“There are a lot of SEO shortcomings and “loopholes” with video right now. Since Google cannot crawl the actual video footage to determine what a video is about it has to rely on the Title of the video and the description and for that it must trust the person that submitted it. This means I can actually use a video about baking chocolate chip cookies and make it rank high for ‘how to lose weight’.
“It is possible that they will eventually have the technology and ability to transcript each video and use that in the ranking by determining keyword density just like in an article, but the technology and cost to do this for the hundreds of millions and videos already online would be astronomical and is not feasible.
“There are plenty of things that video just can’t replace so it will never take over completely. Video is great to see how exercises are performed, but I can’t print the video out on a piece of paper and take it to the gym with me so that I can follow the routine.
“You can watch how someone cooks a certain recipe, but you still want to print it out and use it.
(NOTE: Recommendation coming up right HERE:)
“I believe the integration of text and video on blogs could have a lot of power. An article with keyword density on a subject and then a video along with it could offer a more enhanced user experience than just an article or video alone.
“It took Google a long time to figure out how to combat duplicate content on blogs, and now they are going to be facing the same thing with video, since there is currently software that allows you to submit the same video hundreds of times but with different titles, descriptions, and keywords.
“This is a big reason why video taking over is a long ways off.
But if you want a big piece of the search engine traffic I would definitely start making some videos for your keywords as you will pull more of the virtual market share for that keyword.”
Rick Porter
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Okay, well, I guess I can live with that.
Time to plan out some videos,
Craig Ballantyne
InternetIndependence.com
“People will do almost anything to stay in their comfort zones.
If you want to accomplish anything, get out of your comfort zone.
Strive to increase order and discipline in your life. Discipline usually means doing the opposite of what you feel like doing.” – Kekich Credo #1