How to Increase your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) as a VO Talent: Part 2

This article is the second in a series of articles on increasing your SEO as a Voice Talent.

Hey Peeps!

In Part 1 of this series, we talked about the basics of search engines and searching techniques as they relate to SEO.  In this article, we will focus on some key elements for Website Optimization, specifically Keywords and Site Structure.  

Keywords

Keywords are one of the most important things to consider in SEO, and Keyword research is an extremely important part of marketing your online business.  You should carefully consider what key words you will use to represent you and your business.  These will be the words that people use to search for your product in the search engines.  Start by learning and researching the top ranked web page titles and search result snippets - what were the search terms you used to generate the results?

Some important keyword terms you should know:

•         Keyword Density is the percentage of times a keyword or phrase appears on a web page compared to the total number of words on the page. In the context of search engine optimization keyword density can be used as a factor in determining whether a web page is relevant to a specified keyword or keyword phrase.

•         Keyword Frequency Keyword frequency refers to the number of times a keyword or keyword phrase appears within a web page.

•         Keyword Prominence Keyword prominence refers to how prominent keywords are within a web page. The general recommendation is to place important keywords at, or near, the start of a web page, sentence, TITLE or META tag

Essentially, Keyword Research = Knowing Your Customer.  Start by learning everything you can  about your customer.  Define your target market. Who is going to use your product?  In the voiceover industry, this can be any business directly that needs to advertise their product, as well as production companies, marketing and advertising agencies, and even talent agencies.  Think like your customers. What terms or phrases would your customers use to describe your product or service?

Adding your VO “niche” to your keyword list will help you to target your market.  Keywords that are too broad or general will not reach users as effectively as keywords that are highly targeted.  Be specific and relevant with your keywords. The more specific your keywords are, the better chance you have at building value with search engines. For example, the term “Voice over” is very general and it will take a lot more effort to stand out than if you were to use a more specific term such as “corporate narration voice over” or “audio book narrator”.  It is also a good idea to include both singular and plural versions of your best keywords.

The Google Keyword Tool

Today there are lots of online tools that can help you to determine good keywords to increase your SEO.  One of the best, and one that I use almost exclusively – mostly because it is easy (and free!) is the Google Keyword tool: http://www.adwords.google.com/keywordtool. Simply start typing in search terms and Google will generate a list of keyword ideas and related search terms.  It will also let you know the approximate amount of Global and Monthly searches for those terms, as well as a competition factor.  Words that have low competition and a large amount of searches would be good choices for key words.  Play around with different combinations of words to help determine the ones best for you.

Once you know which keywords are important, your web pages should reflect and target the users who use those keywords. Your goal is to get listed on the first page (and preferably at the top!)  for all popular  keywords in your site category.  You will need to convince the search engine algorithms that your pages are the best results for those keyword searches.  In other words, you will tweak and adjust the web page contents in ways that will cause it to be ranked high.  We will talk about the specifics on how to tweak your pages in subsequent articles in this series.  There is also an entire industry called Search Engine Optimization Services that caters to this; and for a fee most claim that they will get you first page ranking for your key terms.

Site Structure

Your Site Structure will also affect your SEO ranking and how search engines process your web site.  Search engines send programs known as ‘robots, ‘spiders’ or ‘crawlers’ to research the internet and find out what’s on sites. They also use complex algorithms to process the data returned to them by these "robots" to determine the popularity and relevance of sites to be listed on their results pages. Site structure is important because it will affect the ways in which crawlers perceive its content.

In terms of website design for optimization, use the KISS theory!  Your site should have a straightforward and logical structure, very similar to an outline. This not only allows for user-friendly navigation, but it will also help to facilitate search engine discovery of your pages.  For example, if your site has multiple pages, it should be broken down into logical categories, such as 

·         Home

·         About

·         Demos

·         Contact, etc. 

The URLs to these pages should be short, meaningful and not stuffed with keywords, i.e. http://www.annespeak.com/about.html, http://www.annespeak.com/demos.html, etc. Using search-engine friendly URLs allows users and crawlers to find the pages they want with ease.

A side note for those of you with Flash-based web sites:  Most search engines don't like and don't index these sites - not all search engines are able to crawl and index the content of Flash, and if they do, there could be errors, and therefore may not be able to direct visitors to the proper page.  If you have a Flash designed web site, make sure to find out if  it's been optimized for SEO.   Personally, I am not a big fan of  Flash sites in general.  They may be pretty, but they are not always designed to be cross-platform friendly.  Check to see if your site is viewable on your mobile device, or on an iPad!  Also, unless you know Flash and have developed the site yourself, you are at the mercy of your web designer for any small design modifications, including SEO, and that can cost you a pretty penny!

It can also be helpful to generate and submit a site map for your web site to various search engines.  This is basically a list of pages that represent your web site that you have allowed the search engines to index.  You can see an HTML example of a site map on the voices.com website by going to http://www.voices.com/site_map.   Using a site map generator can be a quick and easy way for you to see how search engines interpret your site, as well as to help troubleshoot any issues that search engines may encounter when indexing your site. Most search engines require you to submit your site maps in XML format. You can easily generate an XML sitemap for free at http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/.  They will give you instructions on how to submit your sitemap to Google, Bing, and Yahoo, etc.  They also give you an option to create a text sitemap to have a plain list of all your pages, or an HTML site map (similar to the one at voices.com) to allow human visitors to easily navigate on your site.

In my next article, we will discuss specifics about your Web Page Strategy and how to effectively optimize your pages using the Title, Meta, and Header tags.  Thanks so much for  looking and until next time,

Best Wishes and Much Success,

Anne

About the Author:   Anne Ganguzza has an undeniable passion for all things voice-over and especially enjoys sharing her knowledge with others. This led her to a full time career in voiceover and inspired her to form the local meetup group for voice over artists affectionately known as the Orange County VO Peeps.  She  is a current member of  the Media Communications Association-international (MCA-I.), the LA/Orange County chapter of Media Communications Association-international, and was most recently elected to the Board of Directors for the Media Alliance of Orange County.  She is also a current member of the Society of Accredited Voice Over Artists.

As a voice over artist, her voice is described as professional, believable, warm, and friendly. Her experience includes voices for corporate narration, E-learning, IVR/On Hold Systems, commercials, infomercials, Audio Books, Live Theatre Broadcasts, and Government/Educational promotional videos and advertising.   For more information, please visit Anne on her website at http://www.annespeak.com/