YouTube Amazing Statistics and Trends

Our chapter on YouTube is by far the longest and emphasizes one of the fastest growing areas for marketing your business on the internet. Activity on YouTube also increases your ranking on the regular Google search results – as long as you know how to optimize your videos properly.

Most important to know is that YouTube is owned by Google!

• It’s the #3 most visited website in the world
• It’s the #2 most popular search engine right behind Google itself. Yes, technically, it’s a search engine for videos.
• If you want to know what future generations will be paying attention too, just know that according to a survey by Variety magazine, among US teenagers aged 13 to 18 – their most influential figures are YouTube channels, not mainstream pop stars!     See the Variety YouTube Teenage Pop Star Article here

Add Your Linkedin Company Page Badge & Follow Button to Your Website

Direct your website visitors to your LinkedIn company profile page with a badge and follow button all together.

Click: https://developer.linkedin.com/plugins/company-profile

Type in your company name, decide which layout you want and copy the code to embed into your website.

Add a LinkedIn Follow Button

Owners of LinkedIn Company Pages can add a Follow button to their website. Make it easy for LinkedIn members to follow you. When a LinkedIn member clicks the Follow button, they’ll automatically follow your company on LinkedIn.

The process to get the code is the same as the Badge above.

Tips for Editing Images for Google Image Search

Sometimes we get lucky and can use the picture right out of the camera.  Often times though an image will need a little editing to make it pop.

We use Photoshop, and with their new monthly cloud based fee program, it’s not that expensive. There are many lower cost and free alternatives. With photo editing software you can:

• Crop the image
• Adjust the physical dimensions of the image
• Adjust the file size of the image (smaller = faster load time)
• Adjust the resolution of the image
• Adjust the brightness, contrast, exposure, and color balance
• Add effects

A few simple tips on taking great pictures, editing them, and the latest recommendations for photo editing software.

We’re a big fan of Photoshop and it’s the market leader. However, you must now subscribe to Adobe’s Creative Cloud based service to access the Photoshop program for a monthly fee. You can get the whole suite of Adobe products for a “packaged price” or just subscribe to each platform (like Photoshop) piecemeal.

Copyright Free Images

Caution, consult an attorney if you have any question about your ability to use anyone else’s property. Better safe than sorry.

Do you need some high quality, copyright free content in the form of images and video?

Copyright Free Google Image Search

You can do an advanced search on Google Image Search to show copyright free images. After you search for your keywords, the images are displayed. Click on Search Tools –>Usage Right –>Labels for reuse

See the screenshot example below.

As mentioned before, restriction apply and consult an attorney.

Copyright Free Government Owned Content

Image Dimensions Improve SEO

When uploading images to your website, you can specify a width and height for them. A web browser will begin to display a page even before images are downloaded, provided that it knows the dimensions. Specifying these dimensions can speed up page loading and improve the user experience, all of which Google loves! Without image dimensions, when the browser runs into an image, the browser has to pause loading the page, load the image, then continue loading the page.

Below is a screenshot of of the image dimensions entered in the HTML code on a WordPress image placement.

FYI – WordPress uses widgets to place items like images on the side columns of the website.

Google Wants to Help You Optimize Your Images

Click on Google Images Best Practices and learn how to optimize your images from Google itself.

As outlined in chapter 3 following Google’s guidelines will increase the odds that your images will get top ranking on Google Image Search.

Click here for Google Image Search Guidelines

Below is a great video from Google on properly optimizing images.

The video from Google below explains the importance of ALT tags

Store Images in a Folder (Directory) Named Images

We think it makes it easier on the Google Spiders to find all of your images if they are stored in a folder (directory) called “images”. Note that a directory is just a fancy name for a folder on the server that hosts your website program and files.

For Example: www.PlayGooglesGame.com/images

If you use WordPress, Google has also indicated that another good practice is to create a standalone landing page just for your images, with the ability to allow visitor comments.

We think you should do both.

If you are using WordPress, see the screenshot below from FileZilla for creating a special “images” file folder on your server that you can store your images in.