How To Effectively Use Multimedia for Hyperlocal SEO And Additional Traffic

Are you using your existing multimedia for effective SEO on your hyperlocal blog? Generally, I think we all fall somewhat short getting the most out of what we have. It can be a little tedious to SEO your hyperlocal blog but today I want to share some SEO Tips to generate traffic to your hyperlocal blog.

For this illustration I am optimizing for the term “Your Neighborhood Produce in Monroe, NC.” I will illustrate simple ways to do it that takes little effort and time on my part. I want this article to give me traffic for years to come. If I do a little extra, I’m pretty sure my efforts will pay off.

This is a real life example of what I have done to a particular article on my hyperlocal website in Monroe, NC, The Monroe Scoop.

I recently went out and shot a video of an event called Your Neighborhood Produce. I want to show you the ways I have used the video to give my article and site an SEO and traffic boost.

Hyperlocal Social Media

The first thing I did while editing the video was to take a short segment of the video and post it to the Monroe Scoop Facebook Page. I was editing the video anyway. I took an extra 3 minutes to post a snippet of the video. I wanted to generate some buzz for the article before I published it. Below is a screenshot of my Facebook Page.

The next thing I did was to take a snippet from the video I was editing and upload it to YouTube. This takes virtually no time whatsoever because I’m already sitting and editing my video. It takes just a few moments to grab a piece of the video and upload to YouTube to give your site and article the SEO boost for some long term traffic to your site.

Below are the 2 videos I uploaded. The first video was a short clip and the second video was the completed version. In the video description on YouTube, I linked out to my site in Monroe, NC. YouTube is awesome for the links and traffic. Hey, you already know that though.

The next thing I did was to grab a few screen shots from the video and upload them to my Flickr account. I use the handy Flickr uploader and it took a total of about 3 minutes to upload and tag 7 photos. I did this while I was still editing the original video. I have posted a couple of the photos below just to give you an example.

Since I’m showing you these photos, I will also put in “alt tags” on these photos and they will link back to my original article. Might as well do it since I’m writing about it, right? The links from Flickr are no-follow but they may send me some additional traffic based on searches. I made sure I placed appropriate tags on the photos.

Screen shots from the video uploaded to Flickr.

The next thing I did was to grab the embed code from Flickr for my 7 photo slideshow. You can see that below. Your readers love photos, video and slideshows. Give them what they want, it’s easy and takes very little time to do a little something extra.

Photo slideshow produced from video screenshots

I hope you are still following along. Writing this article has taken a lot longer than what I actually did. Since I have more than one hyperlocal blog, I did a little extra work to send more links back to my original article. I placed a couple of the still photos in a new article. I placed the photo slideshow into the article on my second site.

Here is where I got a little fancy, I placed a screenshot of my video into the new article. It looks exactly like the video but instead will hyperlink back to the article on Monroe Scoop. This created even more links to the article and will also count toward my traffic. I’m hoping to get traffic to both sites because of this little maneuver. Below is the screenshot I used to send traffic back to the original article. If you click it, it will take you to the original article also.

I actually host my own videos on my own hosted server on my sites for the most part. I occasionally post a youtube embedded video when I’m pressed for time. YouTube is great for the links but I do not like how they stream video. I don’t think they operate on enough bandwidth and cause videos to stop and stutter.

Video screen shot used on second site to push more traffic to original article and video

I estimate it took me an extra 15 minutes of work to do what I have described above. It’s important that you use what media you have and turn it into multimedia. The SEO benefit for your hyperlocal blog will be long term and beneficial. There are SEO Experts out there that would do more and are much more talented than I am, but for the citizen journalist trying to get more out of your articles, these few extra steps will help immensely.

Of course I will also send out a few tweets to get visits to the site.

I have no idea when you, the reader, may stumble upon this article. Why don’t you test me out and type in Your Neighborhood Produce in Monroe, NC into Google and see how I did. If I’m not outranking the actual site, hopefully I’m just under it. I could certainly go after the top ranking with more links but that is not necessary for my purposes.

Give this a try the next time you are working on video or posting some photo’s on your hyperlocal blog. Try to get the most out of your multimedia.

2010 Hyperlocal Blogging

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