The second primary key that we are going to talk about is images. Now
a lot of the problems people have with images there either the wrong amount of images on
a page too many too few whatever they are a poor quality which is an instant way to
ruin a really good designs or the wrong size right so when I start thinking about images
on a website I think about images I think about condiments on a burger or for my vegetarian
friends a veggie patty you know if you have too many it just gets gross as sloppy and
it's hard to kind of wrap yourself around it if you have to few it just turns out plane.
I'm sure you've all seen blogs where there aren't any ancillary images, you just have
text shooting down the page, pretty boring. It's hard to wrap yourself around it and get
enthralled in that content. So my three tips for images are number one there is no perfect
number and for everybody that likes rules and it's got to be this or it's got to be
that I apologize. Realistically it takes as many images it takes for your particular content.
Most of the times one to two images is probably going to be sufficient but there've been times
when I put together a blog post and I may have seven or nine images. If I'm doing something
like the seven coolest SEO based plugins for WordPress, for each one of those plugins I
may have a screen shot that shows you why I think it's so cool in that instance is that
too many images I don't think so because each one of those graphics supports the text that's
right next to it. So the big key there is to make sure that it's being supported and
it kind of enhances the text instead of takes away from it. The one thing to keep in mind
what with quantity of images are having a large number of images on your site is one
of the things the search engines look at in terms of trying to figure out where you're
going to rank in their algorithm is site load time so the more images that you have on your
webpage the longer your site load time is going to be. So is your pages are going to
be slower to load up, search engines are looking at that now companies like Google and Bing
and they're saying look if it's going to take a long time to load that that information
let's put them down a little bit further on the list so make sure that you keep that in
mind if you got a lot of images on your page now the second thing the second tip that I've
got for images is poor quality don't use your camera phone I got an iPhone and it takes
pretty good pictures you know of my cats or my daughter or my lunch or whatever the case
is but I'm not any use those pictures for my website so please please please if you're
using imagery for your website either try to get professional photography done which
you know it's not that expensive or try to go for stock photography site there's company
like istockphoto I guess we used primarily and for two or three dollars you can get high
quality professional graphic that you can put on your website and it enhancements, it
doesn't take away from okay so don't use poor quality photos the third thing is to make
sure that you don't use incorrectly sized image we don't want to use print quality images
on the web because print quality images they're larger images, significantly larger images
and that's going to hurt your page load time and that's going to hurt your search results.
Make sure you use the web quality graphics for the web also if you have a large picture
make sure that you are resizing the image with some sort of photo manipulation program,
Photoshop, Gimp, Microsoft Paint, I don't really care what it is but if you got a big
picture makes you to shrink them down before you load up your Web server and put on your
page because if you leave that big image up there and you shrink it down with just your
height and width tags on your image, what happens is that the web browser still needs
to load that really big image so it loads the big image and crunches it down. So again
large page load times can hurt your search engine results okay. The third primary element
we are going to talk about is video. I don't have a whole lot of issues with that my one
issue of video is that not enough small businesses are actually using it for business. If you'll
remember back in the first video we talked about communication how 7% of communication
is communicated through the words that we use 38% communicate through the tone of our
voice and 55% is actually communicated through our body language and how we are talking and
moving so video is awesome on the web because it has it all. You've got the words, you've
got the tone, you've got the voice. So why not do it and trust me on this one for the
next couple years videos is going to be huge so if you're not using it right now my suggestion
is go ahead and get started if you don't think that you can trust me you absolutely can.
We're shooting this video right here I've got $150 flip camera basically the little
Kodak Zi8 camera. I've got a $30 microphone clipped to my shirt and I got a $10 remote
control in my back pocket that I turn the camera on and off with, that's it, less than
200 bucks and I'm shooting video. YouTube's free okay so go ahead and make sure that you
get started so my three tips for the video are number one getting started immediate if
your competitors are doing it that's awesome, be the first one, you can be the forerunner
right people want to use video take a look at how popular YouTube is, people are digging
video right now if you're worried about are my first video not going to be very good don't
worry about it they're probably not going to be. i'm just telling you the truth when
you first get started is a little weird talking into the camera and there is no feedback it's
not speaking onstage or talking to clients it doesn't matter. Remember repetition is
the mother of all learning so the more that you do the better your going to get. We're
still getting started with all this, we're still newbies but you know I can tell you
right now I'm a lot more comfortable talking to a camera now than I was three months ago
okay so repetition is the mother of all learning the second thing that I want to talk about
with videos is make sure you're providing value now that seems relatively obvious, no-brainer
right but it's one of those situations where common sense is not always so common there's
a guy that I can listen to his name in Brendon Burchard, he's one of these expert gurus but
he's got really killer content, check him out. But one of the things he says he says
when you're shooting video and whether it's free, shoot video like you were going to charge
for it so when we put these videos together were asking for a fair amount of your time
you're in the 15, 20, 30 minute videos I want to make sure that I'm delivering content and
delivering value here okay so make sure that you're providing value because you're asking
people for you the most important resource that they have and that's their time. Now
the third tip that I've got for video is going to be make sure that you distribute. Now I
love YouTube. YouTube is awesome second-largest search engine on the planet is good to go.
Love Google, awesome too but they're not the only fish in the sea. There's companies like
Vimeo, Viddler, you can do video on Facebook or blip.tv they're a bunch of these places
you can go to have your video content viewed so what you can do is when you shoot your
video and after you get done uploading it to YouTube you can go ahead and manually upload
it to these other sites and get different users in different customer bases looking
at your content or if you prefer if you got a couple of a bucks there are distribution
services the couple that come to mind right now are up to tubemogul.com or TrafficGeyser.com
and they're both about 100 bucks a month something like that but what you can do is you can actually
load your video up one time you fill out all the form the named descriptions and keywords
all that other stuff and once you load it up it actually distributed to all the other
places so now instead of just loading up to one place like YouTube you can load up to
15 different places at the same time it's a good way to get access to a completely different
customer base then the ones already on YouTube so I would highly recommend that. Now the
fourth element to talk about are interactive element on your website things like animations,
form downloads, calculators stuff like that so any time that you that you have something
like that on your website ask yourself why, why isn't there? The most common problem that
I see with most small businesses nowadays is either their interactive elements have
no purpose, it's just some sort of flash animation that just kind of does stuff you know it's
deceptive or doesn't actually do what you tell people you do or you know there's no
follow-up which is horrible so we we're talking about interactivity you have to think why
am I doing this?What's the purpose behind doing this first of all because you probably
paid somebody to either develop that flash animation or integrate that form or whatever
the case is but why is it that this is going to help your customers get closer and closer
and closer to the decision that you want them to make okay so think about that when you
get ready to start working on things so my three tips for interactive elements are going
to be number one if you got animations on your website they don't specifically serve
your customers if it's a header that's got something flying around or if it's some sort
of an animated under construction graphic I know you guys have seen those, I've seen
a million of them and they're all bad. If those don't specifically serve your customers
dump them because it will end up taking their mind away from the state you want them in
to take that next step that's going to take that action that's going to result in a business
for you or a lead or an appointment set. Whatever the case may be okay so if it doesn't serve
anybody dump it number two don't be deceptive. When you're talking about names and e-mails
of people filling out forms and give you information on mind absolutely do exactly what you are
going to say. I've gone through things that say click here you can you name a e-mail for
instant access to this and I put my e-mail and I wouldn't get instant access to it or
they'd mail it to me the next day or something like that. People are not kidding when it
comes to their contact information if you say that you're giving instant access, give
them instant access and make sure that the content is really killer. And the third piece
the third piece about the interactive element is make sure that your following up. Remember
let's take a look at why we're doing this right the reason why we've got these interactive
elements on our website because we want to start to build a relationship with these people.
We want to start to engage with the people that are coming and visiting on our website
so is that a one-time thing? Absolutely not so make sure that you use some sort of an
auto responder or something like that right so is somebody comes on and download this
report is really cool about five tips on search engine optimization I'm interested I'll download
the report, I'll give them my e-mail that's great what would be smart is if a couple days
later I got another e-mail and these can all be automated that says just wanted to make
sure your chance to take a look at that at that that the report see if you had the questions
we can help you out with Mike and maybe three or four days after that say hey here are some
customers we worked for, here are testimonials and these are some of the ways we helped them
do whatever it is that you are trying to sell them, if any questions let us know so they
don't have to be really pushing or sally just putting in that information because the thing
is people aren't going to give their named or e-mail address if they're not interested
in the information that you have to offer so you're not bothering anybody. Go ahead
and touch bases with them because remember your customers aren't going to buy just because
they download a form. That doesn't mean they are ready to buy right now. A customer is
going to buy on their own time not your time so our goal as business owners is we want
to make sure we stay in a touch with that person by giving them relevant content right
by by providing value to them so that when they are ready to pull the trigger, they've
done all their comparison shopping and they've looked around and they've done this and that
and they are ready to go we want to be the people they remember. Mike was that guy who
was giving me all that great content and great information he seems like a pretty knowledgable
guy I'm going to go ahead and give him my business but that's our goal and that's what
we are here for. Alright there we have it content catastrophes in a nutshell so remember
we learned a few things today number one we know people search online for one main reason
right and that's to solve a problem that they currently have we also learned that we know
100% of the people landing on your website are going to take some sort of action we want them to take as opposed to the action
that they are naturally inclined to take is through great content. We talk about four
primary elements of content. We talked about text, images, and video, and interactive elements
and for each one of those who talk about dos and don'ts and common mishaps so I just wanted
to take this opportunity to say thank you for sticking it out with me today and hopefully
we've given you some some tools that you can walk away with and put those into\
action right away you know if you're working on content for a website use these as a guide
if you already have a content or website go ahead and audit that content go ahead and
take a look at that to see how you are converting on that stuff so if you like this video make
sure you like it feel free to share it with your colleagues, your friends, if you have
any questions about anything we talked about or something that I didn't talk about make
sure that you enter them down below and I'll go ahead and answer those personally. So finally
one last thing, if you haven't signed up for the does your website suck sweepstakes, what
are you waiting for? It's a free website why wouldn't you do it, don't be silly. Sign-up
click the button go take care of that so until next time we're going to be talking about
search engine optimization, we'll see you soon. }