Sunday, February 1, 2009

Video SEO Basics - Market Your Videos to the Search Engines

By Marcus Richard

As you may have noticed, there is a ton of buzz out there about video search and marketing for video search engines, and there are a few posts out there with good information on how to upload your videos to these search engines, but most do not provide insight into the specific needs of SEO for video.

To have a success in video search engine optimization, you should have knowledge of some key technical aspects involving online video and search.

Keyword research is important for Video search engine optimization. However, there are some key differences in terms of the methods that should be employed for keyword researching video terms. In order to know your target audience for seeing your videos, it is important to first conduct some research on keywords and compile a keyword list. This list can be obtained by doing some simple searches for a related product or service. There are not yet any keyword research tools specifically for video. Keep in mind that video searches at this point tend to be shorter keywords, not "long tail" searches. In addition, more than anything, your keyword list should have the word "video" in it. Examples - car videos, car video, racing video, automotive videos, etc....

Once you are through with this, next step is to look across the top video search platforms having the highest performance in overall views, ratings, and latency. The only way to measure your success is to view count.

Well, as you know with keyword research, it is an ongoing process. It is important to pay attention to the feedback, comments, and links to existing related videos to find related keyword terms that you may have missed in your original keyword list.

You will want to encourage readers to submit feedback as studies show that users who provide feedback tend to be more active and easier to convert. In other words, those users that provide feedback, typically are more likely to call, email, visit your site, etc...

If you can do this, it is always better to pick a video theme that is not saturated in terms of competition out there. As an example, a video about Tom Cruise will likely be very hard to optimize for as there are thousands of results for that search.

Another important factor to know is that typically, users do not watch videos that are long and drawn out. Instead, users want quick snacks of video content, usually viewing no more than a few minutes of a video. If you have a video that is many minutes long, consider creating several shorter clips for your video ranging from 1-3 minutes in total length.

With video SEO, it is also important to take advantage of the ability to brand your video using watermarks, logos, text, or any additional information that will get users back to your main destination. That is the beauty of video search engine optimization. It does and will drive traffic back to your website or business.

So, if you want to get your video discovered, view, and consumed by more and more users, video search engine optimization is the way to go. This is a great new technique for getting maximum exposure to your business, and currently, this is such a new topic, that you can be one of the first to capture your keyword or theme with a video search result.

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