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.
Video SEO Strategies – How to Leverage Video Search Optimization
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.
Online video, combined with search, is one of the most effective ways to drive internet users to your videos and market your products and services. However, being that online video marketing is such a new strategy, there are still many aspects of video marketing that are not well understood. For online marketers and video content producers, it is important to learn and practice techniques that increase the likelihood that internet users will discover their content via the major search engines. To do this, one must understand video search optimization, also known as video SEO.
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
To optimize video on your website, it is essential to follow common best practices when it some to general search engine optimization tactics for websites. Additionally, because search engines have a difficult time interpreting video content, you want to include relevant on-page text with your video pages to help search engines understand what the video is about. While there are many tips and techniques for website video SEO, the following tips are essential to keep in mind:
1) Be sure to include relevant, on-page text with your video web page.
2) Consider publishing a transcript or captions for your video.
3) Publish all your videos within the same directory or subdomain and keep each video on its own unique URL.
4) Create and submit a video sitemap to guide the search engines to your video content.
5) Let users share and link to your video in order to increase the off-page linking to your video pages.
Whatever strategy you utilize for optimizing your video content, ReelSEO has a ton of expert tips, guidelines, tutorials, and information for both “posted” and “hosted” video SEO. In addition, ReelSEO is the only website out there today that is 100% focused on video search engine optimization and online video marketing. If you want to learn about online video marketing, ReelSEO is the most authoritative source out there.
Take advantage of online video marketing and video SEO. Good luck to you and your efforts.
Youtube Video Marketing – Create Better Quality Videos Online
Ok so, youre posting videos on YouTube and they lookwell they look like junk. Youre wondering what the heck is going on and how the heck to fix it, right? Well thats where we come in. This article will give you some quick tips and tricks to getting the best quality you can out of YouTube until they change the how and what of their service to allow for better videos or HD content.
There are several variables that you yourself can control prior to uploading the video to the service. Of these the most important are outlined below.
Resolution ” Lets face it, YouTube is now HD Ready like the latest LCD and Plasma televisions. So that means you need to adapt to their system in order to get them to play nice. Their native resolution? Its 720p, a 1280×720 pixels of resolution. Its HD quality, so youll need a video source that can handle it if you want HD quality videos. When you save that video for YouTube make sure you do that in 1280×720 and YouTubes compressor will love you for it and reward you with some better quality and give you the luxury of having a watch in HD link on your videos.
Bitrate ” This is how much data is processed per second when your video is being created or saved. Whenever possible you want this to be as high of a number as you can get. Generally youd like it to be in the range of 6Mbps and 8Mbps. Thats so much data so that when your video goes through the YouTube compressor online, even though there might be a loss of quality, it will still retain enough to look good as it gets popped out the other side. This will make for large file sizes as well so be aware of that.
While youre thinking about the other things youve also got to think about several more things, audio is one of them. You need to have this in MP3 or AAC (44.1KHz Stereo ideally) on the track or you risk losing quality during compression and conversion. Your best bet is to set this to CBR of VBR if you have the option. Framerate is another thing you should pay attention to. To keep thinks flowing smoothly youve got to maintain a minimum of 30+ FPS or frames per second. The file format you need to have your stuff in is .mov or .mp4. If your video editing package cant handle that then youre going to want to look into one that can. Quicktime Pro is often touted as the ideal since its both cheap and handles a wide variety of video formats.
Take all of this into account and youre on your way to some better looking YouTube videos in the near future. Now get out there and get to work!
Video Marketing with Youtube – How to Upload Great Quality Videos
You know youve done it. Youre part of the YouTube generation and youve not only watched videos but uploaded them as well. Once you did that though you realized the quality of your video just sucked. You tried a variety of things and still arent happy with the quality.
So heres the skinny on what you need to do to get your videos to be all they can be on YourTube without massive headaches, expensive hardware and Hollywood-sized editing budgets. The following are the major points to take into account prior to uploading your videos.
Resolution ” YouTube display in a fairly specific resolution and to help their compression utilities get your video up with the minimum of loss of quality you need to match your video up to their resolution. Since theyre using 720p now, which means you should have 1280×720 pixel resolution you need to set your video resolution accordingly. This will cut down on compression time and give you a better idea of what your video will look like in the end. Its not so bad really. The resolution is HD and that means that you can get a real HD experience out of YouTube.
Bitrate ” Youre asking what the heck that is right? Well simply its now much information your video will contain per period of time. Normally this comes up in Kilobits or Megabits per second. Obviously in this regard the higher the better. However if you go too high the video files will far exceed the limitations of YouTube so you need to learn balance Grasshopper. In this case you still want a high number but you dont want it to be sky high. Somewhere around 6Mbps to 8Mbps is a good range. Then when the video gets to the YouTube compactor itll have enough data to retain quality. YouTube can handle up to 1GB of file but only 10 minutes so pay attention to that also.
While youre thinking about the other things youve also got to think about several more things, audio is one of them. You need to have this in MP3 or AAC (44.1KHz Stereo ideally) on the track or you risk losing quality during compression and conversion. Your best bet is to set this to CBR of VBR if you have the option. Framerate is another thing you should pay attention to. To keep thinks flowing smoothly youve got to maintain a minimum of 30+ FPS or frames per second. The file format you need to have your stuff in is .mov or .mp4. If your video editing package cant handle that then youre going to want to look into one that can. Quicktime Pro is often touted as the ideal since its both cheap and handles a wide variety of video formats.
Take all of this into account and youre on your way to some better looking YouTube videos in the near future. Now get out there and get to work!
Ten Tips and Guidelines for Video Search Engine Optimization
People usually love video, millions of Americans consume videos online and same is the case world over. A consumer is most likely to keep in mind and refer to a video in comparison to a print advertisement. These days video making is very economical as compared to the cost of a traditional commercial. Broadband is getting enormous popularity worldwide. Now people can watch videos without long download times or quality issues. Present generation considers video to be a reliable source of news and information. Online video for them is second to nature. Here are a few tips/hints for optimizing your video:
1) It is recommended that you create and submit a transcript for users and the search engines, add a transcript to each video file you’ve uploaded via your Video Status page. Create a Keyword Rich Title for your Transcript; include a brief introductory paragraph/synopsis that describes the subject matter of your transcript (and video) and be sure to publish your transcript.
2) Make sure to include the keyword that you are targeting visitors for. Most often users will use the word “video” in conjunction with their search if searching for videos via the search engines. Therefore, it is important to use the word “video in your title, description, meta tags, and any other on-page text that you include with your video.
3) Off-page SEO, or, the techniques that one uses outside of the actual coding of the site itself (links, etc…), is just as effective for online video content as it is with any other webpage. Therefore, do your best to develop inbound links to your videos with the keywords that you are targeting in the anchor text of those links.
4) Video sitemaps are a great way for you to tell the search engines where all of your video content resides. With video sitemaps, you make it much easier for search engines to discover and index your online video in a rapid manner.
5) It is very difficult for the web crawlers of any search engine to crawl into the video contents inside flash players so they usually prefer to stay away from such files. It is therefore advisable not to use such kind of file formats which discourages the web crawlers.
6) Create search engine friendly keyword URLs for your video pages. To do this, you can use mod-rewrite function or htaccess file so that the URLs are freely assessable and readable by the search engines.
7) The first thing that users see when browsing for or searching for videos is the video thumbnail. Research shows that the thumbnail you choose for your video can really effect the number of viewers that watch the video itself. Try to experiment with the thumbnails that you choose to see which ones create more interest and get seen more often by viewers.
Try to keep one video per page and put all video pages into the same directory or folder.
Besides the tips mentioned above for Video SEO, there are a few other guidelines to keep in mind:
9) Keyword research, as with search engine optimization for other online content, is crucial for targeting the audience you desire most effectively. Use keyword research tools available in order to identify those words that most often are searched for when searching for related content online.
10) Allow users to submit comments and feedback on your videos. Studies show that viewers who offer feedback are those most likely to convert and take the desired action that you are trying to solicit, whether it be an email, website visit, or purchase.
