To optimize your website for search engines, it is recommended to check
your HTML code with the W3C Validator. The fewer mistakes your code
contains, the more Google will like you. The longer you consistently add
interesting content to your website and the more related websites link to
you, the higher your reputation will rise in Googles eyes. Is your website
entirely made up of videos, photos and flash animation? Google will not be
able to understand much of it. Add a descriptive text, a synopsis, festival
participations, reviews etc. and you will be on the first page of the search
results much faster.
I'd like to address search engine optimization online skin deep. Your most
important instruments are still conversations and relationships with like-
minded people. If you want to be found for a certain sequence of words
anyhow, you can find relevant keywords with the Google Adwords Keyword-Tool. It lists how often a term is being searched for per month.
Stay away from words with millions of searches per month, the competition
for them is too high. Instead concentrate on word sequences with 1.000
searches or more per month, that generate less than 10.000 results on
Google.
For example, if you enter "3d animation" into the Adwords-Keyword search
area, you'll obtain a large quantity of similar search terms, amongst others
"3d animation tutorials". If you're planning to create a tutorial addressing 3D
animation, you might be interested in this keyword, because (in October
2009) people were only looking for it 6.600 times.
Test the competition by entering it - surrounded by quotation marks - on
Google.com. (Quotation marks exclude pages, where "3d", "animation" and
"tutorials" appear separately.) For "3d animation tutorials" there are only 9.810 search results (in November 2009). Here it is comparatively easy to appear on the first page of the search results.
Use your keyword in the URL (...yourdomain.com/3d-animation-tutorials-
character-rigging), in the page title, the meta-description, the keyword-tag
and in the text of the tutorial, always in a natural way. Your website has to
be made for visitors, not for search engines.
If you can find a keyword for every subpage of your homebase, with the
process described above, you can cover a large number of search terms.
Every time you or someone else posts a link to your tutorial, your keyword
is part of the anchor text. The more links you collect, the higher you'll rank
for the keyword "3d animation tutorials". For example, if you are showing
five films on your website and find twenty relevant forums and video sites,
every day link one or two work pieces to a forum. After fifty to a hundred
days, one hundred links with your keyword in the anchor text refer to your
website. Repeat this procedure for every new video and each fresh post.
Google Adwords
Most of the time, organic traffic from search engines most of the time grows
very slowly. If you don't want to wait this long, use Google Adwords. Google
takes out an ad next to the search results (for example for "3d animation
tutorials"). In addition, you pay for every click on the ad. Because Adwords
is a payed service, people usually optimize the target page for a certain
goal. The tutorial might be the first out of ten. The visitor will receive the
remaining nine episodes in exchange for his/her email address. At the end
of the series, you could sell a DVD containing a larger collection of
tutorials. A similar approach might be suitable for marketing an internet
based animation series.
A flow of attention is the basis of your business. Be active on social
networking platforms and optimize your website for search engines. Find
websites, where your audience spends time and build relationships with the
owners and the active members. Spread links to your free works and offer
premium content in exchange for an Email address. Your customer
database will grow and your works will attract more and more interest.
