2011 Video SEO and Other Online Promotional Strategies for YouTube and Beyond
By: William Leake (@marketing_bill) Apogee Results
How are online videos found?
- Did you know? – 44% of people discover videos randomly in random search?
- Universal Search: Dominated by Video – 38% of users who searched Google were served video I universal search engine results pages.
- Times & dollars to create a video > time and dollars promote video
“If you’ve got the best content that no one can find, it’s a cost center, not a profit center.”
Importance of YouTube
It’s a YouTube and Google World but there are still some long tail issues. Simple enough, many videos are just not getting enough views.
There are other video networks outside of YouTube. However, if your video is a part of your strategy, you need to get YouTube right first before branching out.
What are Video Search Engines doing?
Generation 2 is using metadata, on-page text, UGC and advanced recognition technologies (speech, visual, facial, OCR, etc).
Basic Options for a Rich Media Strategy
Posted (YouTube):
- Existing traffic – existing video websites have a critical mass of traffic and users, easier to go viral
- Better ability to rank on universal search (Google) and other search engines.
- Potential to dominate the traditional SERPs with “carpet bombing,” by submitting to multiple video sites (due to weak duplicate content filter at present)
- Don’t need your own website
Hosted (Website):
- Control – over related on0page text, encoded metadata, user-experience, etc.
- Control over monetization/advertising
- Generate traffic to your website
- Building a solid foundation on your own website builds
YouTube
Second largest search engine and the third most visited website surpassing Yahoo! this year.
Top Ranking Factors
- Title, description, keyword tags
- Annotations
- Thumps up/down
- Video Responses
- # of Embeds
- Playlists
- Comments
- Links
- Flagging
- Shares
- Subscribers
- Video Age
- View Count
- Honors
- Channel views
Website Video SEO Tips
Metadata (in-file)
- Indexing in-file metadata is still a weak point of search engines, but this is improving.
- Encode your video files with solid, meay metadata that includes your metadata title, date, author, description and keywords
The Video Files Themselves
Offer multiple formats: include keywords in the filename along with “video.”
Site Structure
- Use unique URLS
- One video per URL
- Use embedded players – never pop-ups. Spiders get lost in the pop-ups easily.
- Create navigation links to the video content
- Place the videos in a central root folder/directory
How do Videos get Into Search Engines?
Search engines currently try hard and often fail to crawl the web and index video content. But in marked contrast to traditional SEO, don’t wait for them to find you. Submit your video content via media RSS feed – which are accepted by most video search engines.
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SEO for multimedia & Rich media
By: Scott Polk (@ScottPolk) for ObsidianEdge
SEO is still SEO
Don’t be put off by what you’re optimizing – the fundamentals are the same.
The Power of YouTube – it’s the second largest search engine and third
Becoming the Authority
Polk recommends that you host your own videos. Duplicate content? Maybe but he believes it helps establish your site as an authority on your respective keywords. Brands could see higher ROI and conversion points. You want to be an authority in your marketplace.
- Self host all videos and images
- Depth of content
- Time and more time
Link Building for Rich Media
Link building tactics are the same for videos and extremely important for achieving higher rankings.
- SEO your multimedia
- SEO external hosting
- Social Signals
