Sunday, February 1, 2009

SEO for Video Content - Strategies for Video Marketing & SEO

By Richard Marcus

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.

One strategy for video SEO is that which we call "Posted" video SEO. Essentially, this is when you optimize video content that is uploaded to video websites like Youtube and Yahoo. With "Posted" video SEO, the strategy is to generate as many views as possible for your videos. Uploading your video to these sites allows you to draw upon the massive audience of viewers that these sites already have. In addition, because these websites have a pre-existing authority and page rank with the search engines, this is an effective strategy to leverage these sites to obtain rankings within organic and universal search.

With posted video SEO, it is important that you pay close attention to the keywords that you include in fields entered upon upload like the title, tags, descriptions, etc... We recommend utilizing tools and services that help you to automatically upload your videos to multiple video sharing sites at once. Although it is not impossible to do so, the major downfall with this strategy falls into place when your goal is purely to drive traffic back to your website.

If your goal is to generate traffic back to your website, then you may want optimize video content on your own website. The strategy of optimizing video content on your own website is commonly referred to as "hosted" video SEO, or website video SEO. Because universal search is growing across the major search engines, an opportunity exists for website owners to leverage video content to rank well within both video search engines as well as the major search engines like Google and Yahoo.

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) Leverage the use of transcripts, descriptions, related links, meta tags, URL-structure, etc...

3) Keep your videos within a common directory and publish each video to a unique URL

4) Create a video sitemap and offer an MRSS feed so that search engines can more easily find and index your video content.

5) Let users share and link to your video in order to increase the off-page linking to your video pages.

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.

Take advantage of online video marketing and video SEO. Good luck to you and your efforts. - 15275

About the Author: