What is up everyone?
Welcome back to my channel.
In today's video, you are totally in for a treat.
I think that this is probably one of my most favorite videos that I've made so far, because
I'm going to give you some SEO tricks that you can use against the algorithm for multiple
platforms such as Instagram, YouTube, podcasting, and Google.
If you're interested in learning these secret little hacks that you can implement in your
social media, then keep on watching.
Now, before I go ahead and spill all the secret beans on how you can rank higher in multiple
social media platforms, if you are a beginner, let me just explain what SEO means.
SEO means search engine optimization, and if we're going to be exact, on the dictionary,
it says that search engine optimization is the process of maximizing the number of visitors
to a particular website by ensuring that the site appears high on the list of results returned
by a search engine.
In our case, and for the sake of this video, I'm not going to be talking about website
optimization.
I'm going to be talking about how you can get your videos on YouTube to rank higher,
how you can get your posts on Instagram to rank higher and also how you can get your
podcast to rank higher as well.
Now, let's first start off with one of my favorite platforms, Instagram.
Now for Instagram, I have two SEO tricks to share with you.
The first one I've already mentioned before on my channel specifically in this video right
here, but basically, the idea is that for your bio name, instead of just putting your
name, which is not very searchable, think of keywords that you can put on there that's
related to your niche or your industry.
For example, if you are a fitness coach and you're simply putting your name in your bio
section, a person that's looking for a fitness coach will probably not be searching Vanessa
Lau or Julie or Daniel or whatever your name is.
Instead in the Instagram search bar, they're probably searching for fitness coach.
That's why it's really helpful that in your bio name you actually put in fitness coach
or fitness, whatever, so that you'll actually show up in search when someone is typing in
for a fitness coach.
Now, something that I don't like doing is repeating multiple things on my channel, so
if you want to learn more about those types of tips, then definitely check out this video
if you have not already.
Now, my second piece of advice is a hack that I've never shared on my channel in terms of
Instagram, and that is utilizing Instagram alt text.
Now, Instagram alt text is a very new function that Instagram recently released in January
2019, and not a lot of people have actually tapped into it yet.
Thankfully you're watching this video so you can actually get ahead of the curve.
Now, what alt text means is alternative text.
What this is going to allow you to do is input keywords into your photo.
Now, I'm going to walk you through how to add alt text and also explain kind of why
it's important.
Right now, I'm about to upload a photo.
I'm going to hit next, and after I've put in my caption, my tags and my location, what
I'm going to do is I'm going to go to advanced settings, which you can find at the very bottom
of this page.
I have a feeling that a lot of you probably have never noticed that there was an advanced
settings in general.
Once you click advanced settings, you'll have the option to turn off your comments and also
share this post to Facebook.
However, what you'll also notice is that you can also write alt text.
Now, what alt text is is that it's going be describing the photo, and the reason why alt
text is there is really for people with visual impairment.
What's going to happen is if you have alt text, then Instagram or Siri or whoever is
actually going to read your posts out loud to that audience, but not only this for SEO
and algorithm purposes.
If you put keywords into your post, it's going to really help Instagram understand what your
post is all about and whether or not your post is going to be relevant for a certain
audience.
For instance, let's say my niche is in the business niche, and within my post I write
things like female entrepreneur, entrepreneurship, business, social media, so on and so forth.
That means that when Instagram reads that, they're probably going to be more likely to
actually show my post to someone who is actually interested in those topics.
Now, keep in mind already, even if you're not putting alt text, Instagram is already
doing it for you.
However, I ask you, do you really trust Instagram to figure out what your post is about?
Probably not.
That's why it's going to be really worth the time and effort to include the alt text, so
you get a little bit of a boost in the algorithm.
Now, for example, just to show you live what I'm going to write in this photo, since I'm
in the business niche, maybe I'll write female entrepreneur teaching about business marketing
and social media to content creators and coaches.
Maybe that's what my alt text is going to be.
That means that if someone is visually impaired, Instagram will actually read that out loud
to the person.
Again, like I said earlier, it's also going to help me rank in the algorithm as well.
Now speaking of Instagram, before we hop onto the next tip, if Instagram is really the platform
that you want to grow and thrive in, I'm actually going to be hosting free live masterclasses
in the first week of April.
If you are interested in learning more about Instagram, then definitely sign up using the
link that I'm going to be putting in my description box and in the comment section below.
All of these masterclasses are done live on my Facebook business page, so you definitely
want to sign up to get the exact dates and the times of when I'm actually going to be
hopping on and doing those three trainings.
Now, moving on to the second SEO hack, and this one is for YouTube.
Now, I'm going to let you in on a secret.
Every video that I've posted, I've had to pay for.
The reason why is because I pay a service called rev.com every single time I upload
a video in order to transcribe my video and get the entire text file of every single thing
that I've said in the video.
Let me explain.
Now, a lot of people actually don't realize this, but the closed captions within your
youtube videos matter if you want to rank higher in the algorithm and also to be optimized
for search.
Instead of me telling you, I'm just going to share my screen and show you instead.
All right, so the first thing that you guys need to know is that when you're looking at
people's videos, if there is a cc icon underneath, that means that that video has been closed
caption manually.
Of course when you upload a video, YouTube will automatically auto generate captions
for you.
However, when YouTube does it, it doesn't really count because YouTube is actually not
that accurate.
If you want to rank higher in search and also to be favored by the algorithm, what you'd
want to do is manually transcribe your videos.
Now to do this, I use a service called rev.com.
As you can see, these are all the videos that I've ever transcribed on my channel.
What you want to do once you hit rev.com is you want to click services and you want to
hit transcription.
Now with rev.com, it's a dollar a minute.
If you have podcasts episodes, this is also a great place if you want to transcribe your
podcast as well.
Now, usually what I do is after I upload my video and I have the unlisted link, I actually
share the unlisted link to Rev and I put my URL here.
Rev will automatically calculate the cost.
I'll check it out, and then I'll wait for the transcript to be finished and for me to
actually put it into my video.
Now once the transcription is done, usually it takes a few hours, so make sure that this
is a step that you do in advance.
I'll then have the transcription.
What I'm going to do is I'm going to copy the entire transcription and then put it into
my video, and basically how you do this is when you're editing your videos, you want
to click subtitles/cc.
You then want to add new subtitles and hit English.
In my case, this is something that I've already done, but let's just say I'll do English United
Kingdom as an example, but generally you want to publish it for English, especially if your
video is in English obviously.
You then went to click transcribe and auto sync.
Now, YouTube does take a while to match the audio of your video to the text, so just give
it a couple of minutes, maybe five to 10 minutes, refresh your page, and then you're going to
be able to publish.
Now again, the reason why you want to have your videos transcribed is to allow YouTube
to really understand what is actually inside your video, along with the keywords that you
might be using in your video, so on and so forth.
What this is going to do is that it's actually going to help you not only rank on YouTube
but also rank in Google as well.
Now, moving onto the third SEO hack that I have and this one is for podcasting.
Now in this video right here, I mentioned the pros and cons of podcasting.
One of the cons was that it's a lot harder to be found on podcast versus being found
on YouTube or Instagram or any other platform because podcast's search functionality is
not that great.
However, if you want to beat this, what you want to do is you want to actually add keywords
into your podcast's name and also into your description of your podcast, so very, very
similar to my Instagram hack on changing your bio name and making sure that you have keywords
that fit your niche or your industry, you want to do the exact same thing for podcasts.
By doing so, this will ensure that your podcast is going to have a higher chance in showing
up in search if someone is looking for a specific topic or specific niche.
Let's say my podcast is called the Vanessa Lau show.
I don't have a podcast by the way, but let's just use that as an example.
The Vanessa Lau show, if I just kept it at the Vanessa Lau show, I'll probably never
be found except for word of mouth.
However, if my niche is in social media, business, and female entrepreneurship, then a better
title for my podcast would be the Vanessa Lau-social media, business, and female entrepreneurship.
That's going to ensure that my podcast show is going to show up if someone is searching
for any of those three keywords.
This same principle applies to Facebook groups as well.
Let's look at my own Facebook group.
It's called the Fearless Boss Network, but what you'll notice is that I've also added
keywords such as millennial entrepreneurs and business bosses.
This is going to ensure if someone is searching that within Facebook, my group will show up.
This is definitely a hack that you can apply to multiple social media platforms, not just
Instagram and not just podcasting.
Now, up until this point of the video, you've learned the three little things that you can
do to significantly help your SEO and your algorithm hacking efforts.
That being said, if you are interested in learning more from me, then definitely sign
up using the link in the comments section and the description box below for the free
masterclasses that I'm going to be hosting on my Facebook business page in the first
week of April.
That's coming up super soon if you're watching this at the day that this video has been uploaded.
If you want to learn more about social media, business, personal branding, and life in general,
definitely check out these two videos that I've done right here.
As always, I hope you guys have a great day, a great week, and a great life, and I'll see
you in the next one.
Bye guys.