Videos and Seach Engines
Filed under: Education and Training, SEO on Tuesday, August 21st, 2007 by Simon Heseltine…another in the continuing series of live blogging from the sessions at Search Engine Strategies – San Jose 2007…
This session (filled to capacity) deals with video optimization. Moderator Sapna Satagopan
Sherwood Stranieri was the first speaker
YouTube has more traffic than the other 64 video sites combined
Video is a compelling SEO channel.
Social can transfer value to your SEO efforts through video.
Digg >> blogs>> thousands of links
Those links result in a sugar rush of traffic (mostly untargeted)
Those links do contribute to your site’s rankings, putting you in front of your target audience.
Video for content providers
From bloggers to television networks
Teaser Strategy: upload a few select videos to portal, provide links back to your site to related videos (pulling them to your site)
Video SEO is now mainstream SEO thanks to blended search.
- Follow the buzz
- Showcase your hottest products
- Showcase anticipated uses
- the iPhone is the poster child for online informational video.
Just remember YouTube is not a trade show. – i.e. Blendtec
Sites like Digg, Slashdot, BoingBoing love weird and amusing products.
Make your video interesting i.e. Mentos & Diet Coke
Videos can become a permanent and prominent part of your brand equity.
The next speaker was Jeremy Clem
75% of US internet users watch an average of 158 minutes of online video in May 2007
They viewed more than 8.3 billion video streams
72% watched news video online
- Search is still very dependent on text from video’s corresponding web page.
- Lack of simple and consistent taxonomy for site producers to use
- Video technology is unfriendly to Search Engine Crawlers.
- Make sure to surround video with text… give the engines context.
- Include social bookmarking tools to facilitate easier distribution
- Make it easy for the crawlers to find the video content. Put them all in a folder off the root. Include video in the sitemap / RSS feeds. Put a link in the global footer. Tag your video files. Split your video into specific video scenes and tag each.
- Allow your videos to be imbeddable. Imprint your brand logo on the video.
- Bulk submission tools are available for Google, Yahoo and Blinx.
- Target generic video search term like “news video” to build online brand awareness.
- Train your editors to think like video searchers.
- encode for te right keywords
- One video per URL
- Add tagging
Next up Gregory Markel.
78% of men and 66% of women watch video online
AOL publishes a list of the top 21 videos on all major video search engines.
3 types of video optimization
- Video file meta data
- Upload optimization
- RSS optimization
Recommended tool for submission and tracking analytics – tubemogul - it’s currently free. One stop Universal upload to 9 video engines. View, comments, and ratings tracking and analytics reporting.
The last presenter was Stephen Baker. His tool creates transcripts of videos, which then gives content for the spiders to crawl, and provides a great deal of context for the crawlers. This improves both the customer experience and increases the long tail keywords available to be found on, as well as increasing the monetization possibilities.
