Blending listings from news, images, video, local listings and book search engines, Universal Search from Google will be delivering video more often to the top spots. There are steps to take when thinking about marketing video online, which extends a lot further than just creating a channel on YouTube.
Basic SEO tactics still apply – video optimization really uses mainstream search optimization
Write a relevant, but catchy, video title: Use related key phrases that is relevant to your product, service or brand.
Optimize with tags: Tag your video with key phrases that people are likely to use or based on keyword research. No need to hold back on tags.
Don’t forget your video file name and meta description: Use keywords in your video file name. And don’t forget your thumbnails too.
Develop inbound and cross links: Use keywords as anchor text to link to your video from other areas of your site.
Provide transcripts: This may be difficult to put right on the page, but you could provide an outline of the transcript with the option to download the full version. This helps optimize the copy on the page.
Video best practices help with marketing and SEO
Keep videos short: Rule of thumb is five minutes max online. 1-3 minute segments is better. If it’s a longer segment, break it out into multiple clips. Use good titles and tags, and provide thumbnails for each segment with descriptive highlights. It’s easier for users to pick up where they left off without having to go back to the beginning. Also it offers the opportunity to use more keywords, and helps when users are viewing video on mobile devices.
Use video as an entry point to your other content: Post videos on YouTube, vMix, FaceBook, etc. to provide links back to your site and other content.
YouTube it: YouTube own more than half of all video traffic online. If you post to any user-generated video site make it YouTube. Video search engines are already there, including Google.
Try the Google Video Upload Program: it’s a great tool to upload batch video.
Provide a video sitemap.
Syndicate your video with RSS: Use a publishing tool that supports a Media RSS output, and the optional Media RSS enclosures related to SEO. The most important fields for optimizing video data are the title, description, and keywords.
Offer social bookmarking tools: Provide icons and options to digg, StumbleUpon, delicious, technorati (for blogs), Facebook, etc.
Be viral: Provide the option for users to embed the video code onto their own site.
Brand your video: You’re going through the trouble of creating the video and syndicating it, make it yours and put your logo on it.
Allow comments AND ratings: Videos that receive higher ratings from users are the ones that users tend to favorite and save.
Measurement – who is watching your video and how often?
Now that your video is well-optimized, it’s time to do some tracking. Segments you want to measure for video activity include:
- Overall and individual time spent
- Most watched videos
- Videos with both the highest conversion rate (call-to-action) and the highest abandonment rate
- Failure rates (number of people who could not open the video in their browser)
- If you capture ratings and comments, include the most popular videos with the most feedback.
If you can, create a special section for your video content (subdomain, video site map, video archive on your site, etc.), in order to track how many people are watching your videos. Any web analytics software package can measure this, including Google Analytics. And ifyou use FeedBurner for RSS, it offers trackable items the free package, including measuring total subscribers and total downloads.
Need more? Check out other these sources:
SearchEngineWatch.com
BruceClay.com
SEO-Space.com
SearchEngineLand.com
There are many more, please share.
