What is Video Search Engine Optimization (Video SEO)?

Video search optimization is in its infancy, but it's growing rapidly. As more and more users get broadband access, video's usage level will grow even further. In addition, more and more web sites are simply shoving video in your face.

1. Video search engines that crawl your site: This is the scenario where you host the video on your own site. An example of a video search engine that will crawl your site to find videos is Truveo. While this type of search engine represents a small percentage of your total market opportunity, they are still worth pursuing. They provide a variety of optimization opportunities, including:

• The video file itself. These will usually accomodate a title, a description/summary, and some keywords / tags. Note that this is only useful for those video search sites, such as Truveo, that look at this data, which is currently a small percentage of the video universe. On the other hand, entering this data does not take very long.
• The web page on your site where the user can access, or read about, the video. This is normal HTML we are talking about, so you can customize the content to your heart's content. Title, keywords, meta description, and on page text, etc. Pay particular attention to the on page text as you can write a nice, keyword-rich and compelling description of the video.
• Keep your video files in one directory. This makes it easier for the crawler to find them all.
• Stay away from flash video players. Flash is still not search engine friendly.
• Make use of a Video Sitemap. This will make it easier for the crawlers to find your videos.

2. Video Sites that accept RSS or MRSS feeds: This is the scenario where you submit an RSS or MRSS feed to a third party site. Examples of sites that accept such feeds are:Yahoo Video and Blinkx. The basic approach to optimizing for this type of site is to enter a title, description, keywords, thumbnails, a category, and a full transcript. A full transcript is a really good way to provide good fodder for a video search site to chew on.

3. Video Upload Sites: These are video search engines that require or allow you to upload the video to them. Examples include: YouTube, AOL Video, and Yahoo Video. There are opportunities to optimize these videos as well. Use the following steps:

Other Video Optimization Tips

1. Create compelling content. This is the most important tip in this entire article. If the content is not compelling, then the users will not flock to it. There is no room for gamesmanship here. To go viral, people need to love it.
2. Develop video that reinforces the message of your brand. It's great to have a video go viral, but will it actually help you if it does?
3. Make sure you include the word video on a regular basis throughout any metadata, as many user searches include the word and it will increase your chances of showing up on those queries. Of course, don't go hog wild with it. Note that YouTube has a title tag display limit of 62 characters, so don't go beyond that.
4. Pick a preferred format, such as .mov, .avi, or .wmv. There is no real win in offering the file in multiple formats from a video SEO perspective, but it will be useful to users who want to pick a preferred format. So, just make one of the versions visible to the search engines, and offer them all to users.
5. Keep the length reasonable (5 minutes or less). If the video is too long, you will run the risk of boring the user. There are exceptions to this rule, of course, but if you exceed 5 minutes be very certain that most viewers will be able to remain engaged.
6. Give your video a keyword rich, but catchy title. The title is the biggest factor in convincing a user to view the video.
7. Make good use of the thumbnails to help users decide which video to watch. Users like to watch a quick snapshot so they can decide if they want to invest their time in the full video. Unfortunately, the way you generate thumbnails differs from site to site. But it's an important enough factor in getting people to view your video that it's worth going through the process for each site you upload to.
8. Allow Users to rate your video. Search engines will pay attention to this when ranking these videos. This is also a crucial part of "going viral", as potential viewers are very attracted to highly ranked videos.
9. Commercial content should include a «watermark» to indicate origin. This will help if your video goes viral, and is copied to multiple sites, because it will still carry your branding message and/or site information.
10. Use keywords in the filename and URL. Video search engines place a fair amount of weight on these in the world of video. Avoid using stop words in the filename, such as "the", "and", etc.
11. Use appropriate keywords in the link text for the file. Keyword rich anchor text carries a lot of weight.

Publicizing Your Video

Here are some basic tips that will assist in the promotion of your video:

1. Put your video everywhere. Exposure is king.
2. This includes publicizing your multimedia files with appropriate RSS or MRSS feeds.
3. Use social bookmarking tools that will help in the visibility of the videos. This works regardless of promotional medium. Social bookmarking sites can help your video go viral.
4. Offer the option to embed your video in other people's sites. This really encourages people to spread your video around.
5. End the video with a send to a friend option. Give them some incentive to help you spread the word.

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The Best SEO Methods for Top Search Egine Optimization

1) How to Create a Good Blog Page: Having a good blog page for SEO has many factors. Just one of them is knowing all the proper plugins that you need in place to make your blog stand out, not just for your human visitor, but for the search engines as well. This takes time and research. Keeping up with all the new ones, learning all the new features of the newly updated ones also takes time and research. Then learning to apply and use them
even takes more time.

What is your Blog theme? What is the purpose of your Blog? is it used for Search Engine Optimization or is used to be a conversational blog? What are your main intentions with the traffic you attract? Are you taking a shotgun approach, or are you trying to catch a smaller, a more unique or more loyal group of followers. All these questions answers will tell you how you should design your blog and the style of posts.

Keep asking questions and you will never stop learning when it comes to applications like WordPress and the like.

2) How to Create a Facebook Biz (Fan) Page: Credibility, credibility, credibility. Those are the three main reasons you need a FaceBook biz page. Now you need to add interesting content, attract new followers, create a newsletter subscription etc, etc. As easy as that may sound, that is difficult for people that don’t use or understand FaceBook. For others, they know they need to do it, but don’t have the time or interest.

Even if you use automation or a company such as ours, you should never ignore it. Learn what you should be looking for so you know what you are getting. Challenge here is we only know what we know. So asking questions on the the newest, most productive methods to having people find you and contact you online will always be useful.

The subject of how to capture leads online changes almost as often as Plugins and Bookmarking sites… and so do the answers.

3) How to Manage a Twitter Page: A twitter page, when used correctly is multi-functional. It can be used as a billboard, displaying your Company Name, what you do, a direct phone number, a link to your website or product page and and endless stream of knowledge sharing to your followers. There is almost limitless benefits you can get out of Twitter. Knowing all the techniques and keeping up with all the changing techniques and strategies is almost a full time job in itself, but Twitter, fortunately or unfortunately, plays a big part in your overall online presence and you should be asking questions about Twitter. Plain and simple, it is a very functional tool when used correctly and not misused unintentionally.

4) How to Write and Submit Original Content: This is a BIG one. Supplying original content may seem simple enough at first. How hard can it be to write a 400-450 word article on any subject that you are an expert at? We hope not hard, but what you do with that article after you write it is even more important. Questions like, how do I post it, how do I optimize it so shows up on the search engines. how do I create a proper hyperlink that the search engines will recognize, what is Bookmarking and why is that important? And believe us when we say, the questions don’t and won’t stop there.

5) How to Create RSS Feeds and Distribution: Having quality articles and posts and doing them frequently enough will encourage other sites to recognize your RSS feed. Many of them will pick up your feed and use it on their websites or blogs for content. Knowing how to use all the different feed programs and getting your posts to post in certain locations like your FaceBook page, Twitter Paged, Linkedin Page, etc, etc, and doing it so people don’t get duplicate feed content or just getting the right information to go the the right spot can get confusing, especially if you did not create your online “matrix” correctly from the start. Any good athlete will tell you, you have to have the basics down before you can really excel. Just like in sports, if you don’t have the basics down for you social media, it is almost certain that you will run into challenges later.

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