How are you using technology to grow your business?
All responses below are from Marshall Matheson, VP of Digital Media for DesignWorldOnline, a provider of print and online resources, such as 3D CAD models and industrial videos for OEM machine builders, design engineers and engineering managers.
One of the technologies that is having a true impact on my business is online video. Not only does it help keep my site “sticky,” bringing my customers and subscribers back time and again for in depth interactions, but also it has helped me secure a first-page Google ranking, without spending the tens of thousands of dollars.
What are your business's key tech tools and why?
As I mentioned above, online video, and the SEO benefits it offers is critical to my business. Using an affordable product called SearchSuccess from online platform provider Fliqz, we recently submitted 1000 videos to search engines. Within days, we had received nearly 700 first-page Google search results, and more than 200 number one Google rankings.
Why? Because Google and other search engines works to have a mix of content types displayed in search results (aka Blended Search Results). For this reason, they give a higher ranking to video content than other forms of web content in order to make sure that searches consistently display mixed search results. Also, there is a relative dearth of video content available today, and only a small fraction of the content available is properly submitted to search engines for inclusion in the search indexes. This combination of disproportionate bias towards video content and the small pool of indexed video content available is a gold mine for entrepreneurs like me.
Tips and Tricks
- Get the guidelines. Today, almost all search engines will allow sites to submit video content in the form of an XML feed. However, serialization of the feed is unique to each engine, and not all guidelines are published. Be sure to contact each individual search engine you are targeting for specific guidelines on submission
- Choose a title with zing. In creating an XML feed, search engines give disproportionate weighting to the title of the video, and ignore most other metadata associated with the feed.
