Sheila's Guide To The Good Stuff

You know I’m getting a bit more into video production for CVBs and tourism organizations, and I want to ensure that you understand how important it is to optimize your video content for SEO (Search Engine Optimization.)

Great videos that are never found are just….nice.

The video below features Greg Jarboe telling you a little bit about how to increase your chances of being found – here’s a helpful article on press release and video SEO on Jarboe’s own site.

Hat tip to State of Search, who interviewed Jarboe at the International Search Summit in London this month.

Here’s the direct link to the video on YouTube, in case you can’t see the embedded box….

We are used to seeing handicapped parking spots and curb cuts, but how many of us think about the accessibility of the Internet – specifically travel and tourism Web sites – to those with disabilities?

As I discussed in an earlier post (Can you see this? Let’s talk Web accessibility) I’ve become a convert to the importance of making the Web accessible to everyone, including those who cannot hear or see very well.

By the way, if you are young now but plan to live to old age, come to grips with the realization that you won’t be able to see or hear as well as you do now. Web accessibility matters to everyone, eventually.

The disabled travel, too, and there are millions of them.  Have you thought about whether your tourism-related Web site gives them the information they need to plan a trip?

I’m trying two different tools to make my own content more understandable and easier to use.

Perhaps you can find some useful ideas here for your own site….

1)  BuzzVoice.  Look at the right-hand sidebar on this blog; you’ll see a little phone-looking icon (we call it a widget) created by a company called BuzzVoice.

It uses text-to-speech software to turn my written words into spoken English, so a visually-impaired or dyslexic person can still absorb my content.  Thanks to this post about BuzzVoice by Jason Falls, I’m helping out with the software’s beta-testing.  Your feedback is, of course, most welcome down in the comments for this post.

Is something like this only for the visually-impaired? Nope; another benefit is that people who have long commutes, road trips,  workouts or who simply love audio content can “listen” to my blog posts on iPhones, iPods/MP3 players & other mobile devices (and now on the new iPad.)

To share the Sheila’s Guide talking widget on Facebook, Twitter & other social sites, just click the “Grab This” button at the bottom of the widget (you can embed it like you do a YouTube video.)  You can subscribe to the vocals as an RSS feed or as an iTunes audio feed.

The software doesn’t “translate” perfectly, of course, and it’s an electronic voice rather than my own, but still, it’s a step ahead for allowing multiple ways for readers to enjoy the site.

2)  Video captions.  A service to help you with automated video captioning is now available for all YouTube users, so I’m trying it out on a few of my own videos.

I’ve been schooled by Web accessibility expert Glenda Watson Hyatt on the importance of video captioning for the hearing-impaired (here are some captioning tips on Glenda’s blog) but until this machine transcription service, it was “too hard” and “took too much time.”

To request a machine transcription (the software for it was created by a deaf Google engineer) go to the Edit function of your selected video and look for the tab labeled “Captions.” Click that, and ask for an (English only) machine transcription if it’s not already been done.

You’ll get an .sbv file to download and edit.  I recommend opening it in WordPad for better formatting. You’ll see the words lined up with the time that they were said in the video; you’ll also see that the speech-to-text technology is….er….not terribly accurate.

No matter:  at least you have a time-synched rough draft transcript to work with, right?

Rename the “captions.sbv” file something like “Smithville downtown video transcript.sbv” and go to work – edit the file to make the text match what is actually said in the video.

It is much easier to edit a video when the speaker is clear and speaks slowly; since I tend to speak quickly when I narrate my own videos, I am a pain to edit.

When the .sbv file is ready, upload it back on the same Edit page for the video, and it will automatically be entered into the video.  Watch the captioned video all the way through to make sure everything is correct.  If there is a problem, go back to editing, remove the old file and re-upload your corrected one (it will again be automatically added to your video.)

Here is one of our Tourism Currents videos with captioning: 60 Seconds on Blogger Outreach with Zoetica Media’s Kami Huyse.

Are there SEO (Search Engine Optimization) benefits to adding this caption text to your videos? My very preliminary research indicates that the jury is still out on SEO benefits of YouTube’s captions, but at least now you have a transcript that you might be able to add to the video description or place into your own blog post below the video’s embed box (and that text WILL be indexed by search engine bots.)

More importantly, actual humans appreciate captions. Here is a video from the California School for the Deaf High School (here’s a direct link to it on their YouTube channel) with students explaining why they’re so excited to have more captioned video content – I dare you to watch it and not realize the power of Web accessibility:

While doing a live Tech in Twenty show last night on Blog Talk Radio (our topic was women in social media in 2010 and you can listen or download it here) I noticed that my fellow panelists Colleen Pence and Holly Hoffman both had the same answer when our hosts asked us to tell the audience where they could find us online:

“Just Google me.”

When you’ve worked long and hard and consistently to establish your Web site, blogs, LinkedIn profile, Twitter account, Flickr photostream, Facebook profile, YouTube channel, etc….plus you’re talked about and linked to online….then it is easy to be confident that not only are you “at the top of Page One of Google,” you can FILL that page.

How broad and deep is your destination or attraction’s presence in search engine results, especially with all of the recent changes with Google and Bing?

Does your tourism organization’s material pop up at the top of Google search results, or is there some commercial site or savvy local blogger who trounces you with a better online presence?

How can I help you rise to the top?

There have been some big changes in the world of search engines, and it’s important for the average CVB (Convention and Visitor’s Bureau) and tourism person to understand them, not just “the IT guy” or your hired gun marketing agency.

Google’s site ranking formula is a closely-guarded item, but fundamentally, to rank higher in search engine results you need lots of high-quality sites linking to your site.

Additionally, from Google’s Webmaster Central:

“One of the most important steps in improving your site’s ranking in Google search results is to ensure that it contains plenty of rich information that includes relevant keywords, used appropriately, that indicate the subject matter of your content.”

See how this works?

1. You create quality content, using the same words (called keywords) that visitors use to find you in search engines (i.e., “family vacation packages Toledo”) and….
2. Because your content is high quality and helpful, the humans who run the good sites eventually link to you.  Then….
3. When visitors search, your site comes up at the top of the search results because its content matches what they’re looking for AND your site is seen as having credibility and authority because others have linked to it.

Yep, that’s pretty much the big search “secret.”

It’s all still true, no question, but now there are new elements to consider.

Bing as a Google alternative

Microsoft’s Bing is now the third-largest search engine, behind Google and Yahoo. It’s gaining traction among users partly because of some extra marketing hype, and also because it is now Microsoft’s default search engine and even the default in some Blackberry smartphones.

So what if it’s the default?

Well, how many users change their computer software defaults, and how many take whatever they’re given out of the box?

In a move for more relevancy and cutting-edge “oomph,” Bing was also the first to cut a deal with Twitter and Facebook about featuring their previously-walled-off content in general search results.

There are deep pockets at Microsoft; I would never totally discount them.

Google featuring tweets and Facebook data

Hot on the heels of Bing, the 800-pound Google search gorilla is now also showing individual tweets in search results, and publicly-available Facebook data (meaning mostly Facebook Fan Pages) is coming soon.  You may hear it referred to as “real-time search.”

So what?

So tweets and Facebook chatter suddenly matter beyond simple community- and brand-building and “rainbow Skittles and unicorns.” They matter in how masses of people find information about your destination on Google.

So if you aren’t visible and participating on Twitter and Facebook, you’re missing a newly-significant way of being found by prospective visitors.

From the Tnooz post Twitter, Google and Bing: The Perfect Storm of travel search:

“In one quick stroke the search engines will be including the Zeitgeist of travel:  the here and now of the travel conversation or what the web community is saying about destinations, airlines, hotels, tour operators, agencies and, most importantly,  the reaction to it.

If this is the case, Twitter becomes a powerful channel for travel companies and can no longer be ignored.”

Plain-vanilla Google search isn’t so plain anymore

Until, oh, a month or so ago, you typed in your search terms and waited for the deluge. Anyone else who typed in those same search terms got the same deluge (with some small adjustments based on your geographic location.)

Then came this month’s Googlebomb.

Google now offers search results that are “personalized,” or tailored to your previous personal search patterns (back to about 180 days.) This technically means that 28 people typing in the same search terms might get 28 different search results, based on their previous usage patterns.  The user, by their own history, somewhat controls what he/she sees in search results, which are no longer “neutral” across all searchers. Users can turn off the pattern-tracking cookies or opt-out of this, but I defer to my point above about how many people ever change default settings on things.

So what?

So how do you achieve search engine prominence for your site when the search results are now fractured to match a gazillion different users in “the new normal?”

There is some skepticism that Google is as smart as it thinks it is.  Will the personalization/customization be helpful, or encase searchers in an echo chamber of their own making?  Will serendipity be lost?  Are all of these “helpful” initiatives making Google searches too complex and therefore possibly less trustworthy?  Does traditional SEO even matter in 2010?

So What?

So here’s my advice….

1. As always, produce interesting and helpful content for visitors to your destination or attraction, but don’t produce it just for a Web site.
2. You’ve got to be “out and about” – searchable and findable in more than one way (including mobile, where Google also made some significant search strides.)
3. You need to consider not only the customer relationships and awareness benefits of your Twitter stream, but also the use of keywords in your tweets. Yes, search engine optimization (SEO) has come to Twitter.
4. A Facebook Fan Page, which I recommended recently as a good first step into social media, has now become more than a nice-to-have.  The question should not be “do we need it,” but “why shouldn’t we have one?”

If I missed any significant issues or implications of the many recent changes in search engines, I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.