I agree with Peter. This is an interesting question and one that many brands face. It reminds me a little of a similar question that was asked recently here in Q&A regarding ampersands in brand names.

Here's my advice. Part of writing your business plan should include determining certain "branding" rules and guidelines. These should include official logos, colors, fonts, style sheets, etc. Make all of that play into your branding. Then, stick to it like glue unless there's some earth-shattering, mind-warping reason to rock boat and change it.

Like Peter, our brand name is two words "CCI Solutions." Our brand name is further complicated by the fact that there are probably a dozen or so other "CCI Solutions" in the world, spanning industries from HR, to healthcare to online learning. We've suffered difficulty giving our brand an "identity" because of our own inconsistencies and ambivalence towards what we call ourselves and how we present ourselves. If your presentation is inconsistent, your potential loyal fans are going to be confused and confusion is something you never want when carving out a place for yourself.

Choose one or the other using careful consideration and common sense, and then relentlessly stick to it and drive it home.

I agree completely with Marie. However, I do think that Google Adwords ads can have a positive impact on how much revenue your good organic rankings produce. In terms of dominating Page 1 results, if you have good organic ranking (say, in the top 5) and you also have excellent paid placement (in the top 3 od paid ads), and you are ranking for images, and you are ranking for videos, and you are ranking in Google shopping....all of this is going to have a collective effect.

If you have that kind of presence, you are bound to gain aggregate value for your organic listings because, if you are marketing well, your traffic will go up, click-through rate will go up and your conversion rate will go up. I firmly believe that if you are improving those things, your rankings will improve also.

That being said, PPC, if it's really well done, can augment your results and could possibly have a residual effect that does benefit your SEO

One other consideration is that any advertising you do, whether it's PPC or print or radio or TV ads, it augments Direct traffic. Direct traffic, in my mind is the golden ticket. Anyone directly typing your URL into their search bar is already your friend. If you can increase your direct traffic pool via PPC, then it's worth every penny.

Hope this is helpful!

Dana

P.S. My statements are based on years of observation. When we've advertised on Google Adwords our visits from organic and direct traffic increased. When we didn't, it decreased....Keep in mind, this was for keywords for which we ranked on the same page for organic and paid results.  Sounds like fuel for a future blog post for me!

Personally, I wouldn't do it. Does it work? Maybe. Or, maybe it works for a while and then Googlebot wises up and deindexes you. Is all the work you will have to go through for reconsideration going to justify hiding that tag? I'd say, definitely not.

It's just an

tag...leave it on the page and visible. Listen to your conservative gut and do what you know is the right thing. That's my two cents

Phil Nottingham is the top expert, in my opinion, on this subject. He has written extensively on this topic both here and at Distilled.net. I would very highly recommend searching here for "phil nottingham video SEO" and then repeat the same search in Google. He's brilliant, and believe me has probably already answered every question you could possibly have about where to host your videos, and better yet, why.

The first thing I think Phil would say would be: First determine what purpose you want the videos to serve, then determine the most appropriate place to host them.

He would say a lot more, and much better (particularly with the accent!) than I do. Here's a video from Phil & Will at Distilled (that's fun to say) to get you started:  http://wistia.com/learning/advanced-seo-with-distilled

Enjoy!

I received my MS degree in Internet Marketing from Full Sail University in July, 2010. My background was in classical music (DMA from University of Illinois, 1993). I can speak from personal experience that the program, the professors and my colleagues in the Internet Marketing degree program were superb. I completely disagree that writing skills are the most important for SEOs. Good SEOs are people who have the unique ability to be both right and left-brained. I am currently the in-house SEO Strategist at CCI Solutions in Olympia, WA. Prior to that I was the in-house SEO for Kingdom, Inc. in Mansfield,PA. They promoted me after I received my degree, but their competitor, CCI, hired me away from them.  Don't get me wrong, I write a lot of content too, but hiring a English major to do your SEO would be a big mistake (IMHO). The company I am doing SEO for now is facing a myriad of technical SEO issues. They have loads and loads of great content, but still they thought their content was a problem. Sure, it needed some improvement, content always does. But they have such a long laundry list of technical SEO problems (i.e. meta refresh on the homepage, duplicate content from old domains, malformed URLs, improperly managed 301-redirects),  that all of this is still completely undermining any content production they do. You aren't going to find a writer capable of managing a project to fix those issues because it's foreign to them. You need a real SEO. Someone who can walk that fine line between science and art. Everyone's a little different. Everyone in the Full Sail program had different skill sets. Some were CEOs, some were Web developers, some were Web designers...Just keep in mind that Internet Marketing and SEO are really two different things. There are people who are good at one but not the other. There are people who are good at both. Ask a lot of questions specific to your business and SEO challenges and hold out for the right person. Ask who they follow in the SEO community. Ask them what tools they use. Ask them about their previous projects.

Keep this in mind. If you do hire an English major and train them in SEO, and they get really good at it., you will have just trained them for somebody else, because they will most likely leave. Hire a skilled SEO with experience. If you can't afford one, consider outsourcing to a company with great credentials like SEER Interactive, Distilled, SEOFlow, Blue Glass, AimClear...etc. There really are lots of good ones.

Hope this helps!

Dana

Yes, multiple H2 and H3s are perfectly okay as long as they make sense. Think about the outline of a book or research paper. You could have Chapter 1, followed by several or many subchapters, and each of those subchapters or subheadings could have subsections. As long as those headings make sense in terms of the structure of your content, it's perfectly ok. There are even times when multiple H1 tags are okay. For example a very big site, or business, that might have three different arms of the business that all want to be represented equally on the home page, might possibly have multiple H1s (although be really really careful with that).  Hope this helps!

Thanks Robert. Ah, I understood now. You are an agency vs. a company looking to hire someone to do SEO in-house. I should have paid more attention.   Yes, I would think if you are training your folks and pay is competitive, holding on to someone shouldn't be that hard. Companies like mine though, that have taken the leap and hired someone in-house always run the risk of spending a lot to train someone up and if that person does become a SEO rockstar, that individual most likely will move on and the company will have to start again with someone else.

Understood on the English major bit. I think the fact that my current SEO project has had so much technical SEO involved, that the writing part falls to someone else who is directed by me. Still, with Google continuing  Penguin updates, is all that SEO-optimized content really getting anyone better rankings? If so, then writing is still important SEO - but for how much longer? A good writer doesn't need to know a lick of SEO to be a good writer.  If SEO-optimized copy isn't helping to improve rankings, build links, etc. , then the technical aspects of SEO will become more important. By technical SEO i mean page speed, proper coding, crawlability, index ability, site architecture, CRO, accessibility, Web design and usability.

Whew! That was amouthful! All that being said...

The MS program in Internet Marketing at Full Sail was just that, Internet Marketing. We only spent 1 month out of the entire year on SEO, so for those students who came into the program knowing very little, they probably left knowing very little. SEO has always been where my interests and passions lay, so I studied that and Analytics whether we were doing coursework on it or not.

No you won't get penalized for duplicate content because what you are doing is, in effect, syndicating content. YouTube owns the original content and will get credit for the original content. This is a similar scenario to say, a new story from Associated Press that gets picked up and published in newspapers across the country. They are syndicating, not duplicating the content. However, the credit for that content creation is retained by the original source.

Hope that helps!

Dana

I think this entirely depends on the nature of your business. All I can share with you is my own experience with this. I do SEO for several sites, one is a very small, very tight niche business. I have identified about 264 keywords that are key to the business. Out of those, probably only 10 show any search volume in the Google keyword tool at all. However, every single one of them has produced revenue (that's how they ended up on my final list). How much revenue could one possibly get out of a site that only focused on 264 keywords and only 10 of them showed any search volume in Google? What if I told you it was possible to do over $3 million a year?

Remember, Google's Keyword tool is just that, a tool. It can't replace intimate knowledge of your customers and your products. If you know those things inside out, trust that knowledge and go after the keywords you know your customers are going to use to find you. Let your competition obsess over broad keywords that do show search volume. They'll miss the mark and you'll hit it out of the park.

All that being said, it does depend on your business model. Obviously if you box yourself into a niche that's too tight, you just might be putting yourself into a place where there just isn't enough demand for what you're offering to make it. Then, you might need to broaden the scope, or select a niche that isn't quite as limited.

Just my take - I hope that's helpful!

Dana

Hi all,

Because I needed to educate myself on how to get the most out of the new Keyword Planner versus the old Keyword Tool, I wrote a blog post last week on the subject located here:

http://www.danatanseo.com/2013/07/google-keyword-planner-vs-keyword-tool.html

Dan, you are correct the new default is exact match, while the old was broad, and yes, now you can toggle between "exact" "phrase" and "broad" with one major caveat, these are based on your specific Adwords account targeting settings. So for example, in my case, we target only the USA, so now my results when researching are only the USA....which may not be appropriate at all if I am doing research for a client that targets more that just the US. I'm sure you can see how that could pose some significant problems for accurately targeting high-opportunity keywords for other countries.

As Jeff says below, yes, you can still get global monthly search volume by targeting all locations. For me, the only way to reasonably do this without fear of totally screwing up the settings on my existing Adwords campaigns is to open a completely separate Adwords account just so I can do research. Yuck!

Fortunately, there are some alternatives to the old Google Keywords Tool:  Wordstream's Keyword Tool, UberSuggest, SEMRush, SEOBook's Keyword Tool

Larry Kim has also written a good post on the differences between the old and new Keywords Tool/Planner....but it's a little daunting (IMHO), so read it first thing in the morning when you are wide awake with a fresh coffee at your side.

Hope this helps guys!

P.S. The other thing that really sucks is you can no longer check a box next to specific keywords and export just those. You now have to export the entire list and filter through them in Excel. This drives me nuts!