Strategies for Video Search Marketing – What is Video SEO?
Everyone knows that online video is the fastest growing online medium. As of Oct. 2008, not only is it popular, but on the major 5 search engines,video has now passed search as the most popular online activity, according to research released by comScore and covered by ReelSEO.
For internet marketers, online video is a buzz topic right now and the reason is that it is one of the most effective ways to convey your marketing message and brand. However, because online video marketing is such a new phenomena, there are many aspects that are not well understood. Content producers and marketers are clamoring to produce videos for online use, but many do not understand what it takes to get traffic to their videos. The first step in gaining exposure for your online video content is in making certain that it is discoverable. That is where Video search engine optimization, also known as Video SEO comes in.
In order to leverage the power of online video with search, one must first answer the question, “what is video SEO, or video search engine optimization?” Simply stated, it is the art and process of creating online video content in such a way that it is easily discovered and indexed by search engines. Doing this will help to drive maximum exposure to your video content. When we talk about video SEO, there are really 2 separate and distinct strategies for optimizing video online.
“Posted” video SEO is one strategy whereby the goal is to get as many viewers as possible to your video content. “Posted” video is basically when you optimize video content that is uploaded to video sharing websites. The benefit with this strategy is that you can leverage the massive viewing audiences that already exist at these major video destinations like Youtube and metacafe. Additionally, by uploading videos to these video sharing websites, you can leverage the pre-established page rank and authority that these sites have in order to assist you in ranking well within universal search.
When optimizing your video for uploading (“posted” video SEO), it is very important that you choose your target keywords wisely and include these in your titles, descriptions, tags, comments, etc… There are also many services available on the web that allow you to upload your videos to multiple video sharing websites at once. Although there are a few tactics that can help, for the most part, a “posted” strategy does not assist well with driving traffic back to your own website.
While “Posted” video SEO is a great strategy for getting video views, “Hosted” video SEO is a good strategy when your goal is to drive users to your own website. Essentially, “hosted” video SEO is the practice of optimizing your own website video content. Another benefit to this strategy is that it allows website owners to leverage video content to generate high rankings within the major search engines due to the proliferation of universal search
For “hosted” video SEO strategy, it is most crucial that you consider it a holistic approach to website optimization and follow general best practices for optimizing website content. That being said, because search engines can not yet understand the content within a video, it is most important that you optimize your pages utilizing on-page text that is relevant to your video content. There are many tips and techniques for “hosted” video SEO. The following tips are crucial:
1) Make sure that the page with your video on it includes a good amount of relevant on-page text to guide the search engines. Include your keywords in your meta tags, URL string, descriptions, etc…
2)Take advantage of captions, transcripts, related links, meta tags, etc…
3) Keep your videos within a common directory and publish each video to a unique URL
4) Publish a video sitemap or MRSS feed to help guide the search engines to your video content.
5) Create inbound links to your video pages and encourage linking and sharing of your video content.
Whether your strategy is to drive visits to your video or to your website in general, video SEO is an effective way to leverage the power of online video. If you are interested in learning more advanced tips and techniques for either “posted” or “hosted” video content, ReelSEO is the website to visit. They are the only site completely focused on providing resources and information for Video SEO.
Good luck and happy optimization. Get on board with Video SEO today.
