Social Media platforms are increasingly important marketing channels when it comes to attracting new customers for your products and services.
When looking for example at your Facebook time-line, you will see that the content is always either visual (an attractive image) or a (auto-play) video. Same goes for LinkedIn, Twitter and Google+.
Vlogs are hot!
Joomla (but also Wordpress) is a Content Management System with which you can build up a very strong on-line reputation when it comes to who you are and why your products / services are the best for your customers.
But you need to make sure that everything you do on-line leads back to your website: that is how your web-site's reputation grows and that is how Google values your on-line reputation when creating their search ranking index.
The higher your reputation, the higher your ranking.
So when you create a Vlog on (e.g.) YouTube and you share that Vlog on Social Media, there is NO link to your website. The on-line credits go to YouTube! The same applies for Vimeo and other providers.
What is the best way to promote my vlogs on my (joomla) website AND retain the Search Engine credits?
That was a question a customer asked me when I build a Community website for them.
Let me share my experiences with you so you to can also leverage your web site with customer attracting Vlogs.
Although Joomla! is fully optimized for #SEO out-of-the-box I will be using two additional plugins that will make Joomla also unrivaled in the Social Media 'arena' (#SMO).
Requisites:
- Joomla 3.7+ (we are going to use Custom Fields)
- ochFitvids for easily inserting responsive (yuotube) vlogs into your joomla! articles
- ochOpenGraph for setting (custom) OpenGraph and Twitter Cards meta-tags
- Knowledge between chair and keyboard to create a Joomla article :)
One time (ochOpenGraph) configuration
Add the following custom article fields (Joomla build-in Custom fields functionality):
- ogImage (type: media)
- twitterImage (type: media)
- ogURL (type: URL)
- ogTitle (type: text)
- twitterTitle (type: text)
- ogDescription (type: textarea)
- twitterDescription (type: textarea)
Create a new article:
- Set the title of the article / vlog (make sure it has a strong call 2 action as this is what will be displayed on Google)
- In the text area of the article:
- type an intro text followed by a [read-more]
- paste the YouTube embed code below the [read-more]
- Set the Custom field ogImage (and the twitterImage if you want to have a different image for Twitter) with the high resolution (min. 1200 x 630px) image for the article
- Set the meta description of the article [used by Google in the Search results]
That is it: you have just created a Vlog that will display your YouTube video responsive (automagically scales to visitor’s device screen size) on your own website!
How to really want to stand out of the on-line crowd
If you want to differentiate (and you should) between how your vlog page is displayed on Google (Search results), Facebook, Linkedin, and Twitter you can also set the following optional fields in your article. This is where the real power of ochOpenGraph comes into play!
- Set the Custom field ogTitle [Used by Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ etc. as the title of the article], leave empty to use the article title
- Set the Custom field twitterTitle [Used by Twitter as the title of the article], leave empty to use the article title
- Set the Custom field ogDescription [Used by Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ etc. as the description of the article], leave empty to use the article meta description
- Set the Custom field twitterDescription [Used by Twitter as the description of the article], leave empty to use the article meta description
Yes, you are understanding this correctly: Every platform has it’s own audience and you can set the title and description for your Vlog (and any article, page, blog) tuned for the audience of that platform!
It’s that simple?
Yes it is! The ochFitVids and ochOpenGraph plugins do all the hard work for you and let you and your visitors share your Vlog in a platform optimized way. It also keeps your visitors longer on your web-page (Google ranking factor!) because the video perfectly fits the user’s device screen: no annoying scrolling or turning devices to see the full screen!
Pro-tip!
When you want to share your Vlog as a seamless integrated video in Facebook and not as an post / image that needs to be clicked to go to your web site’s Vlog, you can set the custom ogURL field to the YouTube url of the Vlog.
When your Vlog is shared on Facebook, Facebook will fetch your Vlog and uses the link in the ogURL field to directly show your video (which will auto-play, just like video’s you upload directly in Facebook). How cool is that!
Please leave a comment if you found this post useful or if you have tips yourself!