Video Search Engine Optimization

By Mike Sachoff - Tue, 08/19/2008 - 9:35am.
Tips on optimization
In the SES session "Video Search Engine Optimization" (VSEO), Greg Jarboe, president & co-founder, SEO-PR, started by talking about YouTube.
(Coverage of the SES San Jose conference will continue through its end. Keep an eye on WebProNews for more notes and video from the event this week.)
YouTube accounts for 98 percent of the video views on all Google sites. YouTube hosts 83.4 million videos. It dominates because it is a video-sharing site. You have to optimize and develop a video sharing strategy.
One off videos are interesting, but you really need to look for repeatable patterns. Occasional spikes are wonderful but you want to see views take off on a sustained basis.
One of his more popular videos had 13 percent of its views come from search and 75 percent of the views came from related videos. People don't watch a single video, they watch batches of video.
He has optimized 130 videos over 4 shows for SES. Seventy-one percent of the views came from embedded YouTube players on other site's blogs. If you can get people to embed your video into a blog you are really on to something.
Create a customized video player widget for you Web site or blog audience. The secret of video search optimization is video sharing.
Chase Norlin, CEO, Pixy Corporation, touched on trends in video search and how to optimize for it.
PureVideo is a video search engine. To optimize for it add rich Meta data. Push out a media rss/mrss feed on a regular basis. Contact and submit video to search engines.
Simple email to search video search engines can help you get added to their crawl queues.
Steve Espinosa, Director of product development & management, eLocal Listing, gave tips for getting universal results for Yahoo and Google.
Export in SWF file format and do not use active x controls. Create a video sitemap and build a page for each video. Optimize the page using title tags and link from your index page to your video page. Use a constant video description and title across all sites.
Use analytics and pay attention to dwell time. Do a/b variant testing to determine which videos get the best response and where to place links to your videos from your index page.
Utilize thumbnails and show your call to action in your thumbnail.
Matthew Scheybeler, CTO, blinkx, gave advice on SEO Do's for video.
Provide well-placed and meaningful metadata. Use a cleaner to remove irrelevant Meta data. Use only one video per page and have plenty of text.
Make sure the video is titled something appropriate and take advantage of rss/mrss.
Avoid tag spam, flash only and dynamic players. Also avoid pop up players.
Gregory Markel, founder/president, Infuse Creative, spoke about why you should optimize video.
Video search is popular and video is effective for branding and reputation management.
The keyword for "video" is searched many times more than the keyword for "god." Video is that hot.