SEO tips in 20 minutes

In December last year, I did a short presentation at a hackersandpainters session about how I got my wine store) to the top of Google Singapore for some wine keywords. Here is the edited version, mercifully shortened for conciseness by the delightful Michael Cheng. Thanks Michael!

Summary of the SEO Tips

1. [2:00] I was surprised to discover organic keywords bringing traffic to bottles of joy via Google Analytics. I made some inferences about what caused the increase, since Google's search ranking algorithm is not published.

2. [3:30] The keywords that were ranking well were not highly competitive, which is why my rudimentary efforts yielded some results. I started considering what were the reasons for this ranking.

3. [4:45] The take away is to use Youtube. I show the blog post for the Furst von Metternich Sparkling Riesling video review, and its high position for "sparkling riesling singapore" on Google. It is highly likely that it is the presence of the video that gave that particular post a big boost. I prove this by searching for "Veuve Clicquot Singapore" and show that a few spammy videos of 4 second length also occupy good positions.

4. [7:40] Write a video transcript to accompany the video. This gives you a better chance of ranking well since a video doesn't contain text for Google's crawlers.

5. [8:30] Set up Google Authorship. Authorship gives you your writer's reputation to carry around the internet. The presence of authorship is a search ranking factor so set it up even if you don't use your personal profile.

6. [10:45] Distribute your content well. Feel free to distribute your content to Wordpress, Quora and so on, basically everywhere you can.

7. [10:10] Spend a few extra minute to craft a better title and use the right keywords in your title. It's worth it!

8. [16:50] Hosting your video on a service other than Youtube is not supposed to make a difference to your Google ranking. It is difficult to say though.

9. [18:00] Some people use tools to change words in a block of text in order to generate boilerplate that can be posted many times over. It's easy to create almost entirely unique articles. These are called spinners.