Design World Online, the website for Cleveland-based Design World magazines, provides news, articles, 3D computer-aided design (CAD) models, and industrial videos for original equipment machine builders, design engineers, and engineering managers. The company used new technology when submitting 1,000 videos to search engines last year and received nearly 700 first-page Google search results and more than 200 number one Google rankings, Marshall Matheson, online media senior vice president, tells IncTechnology.com.
Elizabeth Wasserman: What does Design World Online do?
Marshall Matheson: We develop editorial content, engineering resources, and publish engineering news for the design engineering community. Our online site has been a central focus that also supports our print publication, Design World magazine, with 40,000 circulation. When I came from the industry side to grow the online what we saw were the dinosaurs of the publishing world and we wanted to stay on the leading edge of technology. We serve the design engineer and engineering manager in the semiconductor, medical, packaging and other industries. We connect suppliers’ products and services to that audience. Most design in 3D CAD so our 3D models are a big part of our site.
Wasserman: How do you serve you readers with online video?
Matheson: We wanted our own brand of online video. We used YouTube when we first launched, and continue to do so but we wanted the leverage of having videos along with our own editorial content, to take that and embed it in an article on a webpage and use that as a platform to do our own video distribution. We also wanted to have a video library broken down into such categories as robotics, mechanics, motion control and so on. We have videos of everything from our own editorial, video of suppliers at trade shows to technical overviews of products and training.
Wasserman: There came a point when you realized that you needed to find a way for readers to see your videos. What did you do?
Matheson: We’ve always done search engine optimization (SEO) on our websites. We actually operate 24 different websites. One is specifically on sensors, another on pneumatics, and another on mechatronics. We did a lot of SEO for the sites and videos and also signed on to try a product from Fliqz called SearchSuccess when it was in beta testing. It’s a suite of tools and applications to help SEO on your submissions to Google. We saw an immediate uptick in our video rankings. We took all the videos on our site and submitted them to Google using the Fliqz SEO tools. That helps the categorization process.
Wasserman: What results did you see?
Matheson: Immediately within a few weeks of doing that we started seeing our videos turn up in the number one search positions with a thumbnail picture and all. We do have some unique search terms. If people are looking for specific engineering terms we are often the number one spot on a page or at least in the top 10. Some of our videos went viral. Then we had a video on a military surveillance project and there were communities interested in the technology. The video went viral and our traffic was up over 3000 percent within one month.
Wasserman: What are your plans for SEO going forward?
Matheson: We’re going to continue the video SEO. Google changes things around a lot. It’s a constant fight to keep up with that.
