People like video online. The growth of broadband has changed the way we organize content — we’re not in text anymore, Dorothy!  But how does it affect your rankings?

Really nicely according to Nate Elliot over at Forrester.  His team ran a test on how sites ranked in the major search engines for 40 of the most popular keyword phrases. The basic finding was that where videos existed in the pool of possibilities for a query, video boosted rankings.  They did some back of the envelope math and came up with the result that each video in the pool has an 11,000 to 1 chance of ranking on the first page, compared with a 500,000 to 1 chance for a basic text page.  Big difference (even if the math is a little wobbly).

The underlying message is that optimized videos are becoming more important — you still need to connect text to your videos in order to get them to display in search results. Elliot offers some basic video optimization tips, which I will not duplicate here since you can read them in his brief post.

I think for most small to medium sized businesses the biggest challenge will be to make the video in the first place.  Yeah, I know that any 8th grader can shoot a video and upload it, but that’s not the same thing as having a video that both promotes your business AND is interesting enough to get some viral distribution.  Plus, you need to have a good way to display it on your site.  It takes a little work — but it sounds like it’s worth it.

Nothing is more central to the onpage SEO than keyword selection and deployment.  I know I harp on this, but the search engines are trying to gauge relevancy, and they still do it mostly the old-fashioned way:  they read text.  What’s on your page is one of the two major sources of information (’signals’ in insider lingo) the SEs use to rank your page.

A few days ago one of my favorite writers, P.J. Fusco of the ClickZ network, published some keyword analysis research that tested how the big 3 search engines (Google, Yahoo and MSN) ranked pages for the keyword ‘fitness equipment’.  I instantly grabbed her table graphic showing results for my afternoon presentation at the Central Coast Wedding Professionals’ monthly meeting because the hows and whys of keywords on pages is so basic to SEO.

PJ Fusco's summary chart for keyword impact on rankings

There’s a lot of information here, but one take away is that the SEO guy who tries to play by fixed ‘rules’ (you need exactly 12 mentions of your keyword!) is wrong.  The variability is much higher than would fit with nice neat rules like that.  That’s not surprising when you realize Google uses in the neighborhood of 200 signals to evaluate a page (according to a number of bloggers — whatever the exact number, it isn’t trivial).

In fact, in a table I do not reproduce here, PJ found that the #1 ranking site for ‘fitness equipment’ on MSN does not use the keyword in the meta description, URL, alternative text, link text, bold or italicized text, or <H1> headers.  What the heck is that about?

Well, there’s inbound links for one thing.  There’s history.  There’s (mostly unknown) behavioral factors.  We do not know what is in those algorithms, no matter how much we test.

Does this mean you can/should ignore the onpage keyword SEO?  Of course not.  Especially if you don’t have tons of great, high quality inbound links, or your site is relatively new, but even if you are doing well in rankings — do what you can to make your site relevant to specific keyword queries that match your content and your offer. The broader message of the research is that 100% of the ranking sites used the keyword phrase in the title tag; the big majority used it in the meta description; and so forth (see the table).

As I always say, it’s not rocket science.  But it does require some research, attention to detail, and followup.  Success is the reward for thoughtful persistence.

This is a quickie:  see this diagram for a nice summary of the additional factors you can consider in optimizing a local business website, courtesy of Greg Sterling.  It’s based on the analysis of David Mihm.