May 2007 saw the introduction of an Internet search technology that is already revolutionizing the world of SEO. Gone are the days of text-only search engine optimization. Welcome to the rise of ‘universal search’ - the integration of Google’s video, news, book and image search engine results with those it gets by crawling websites. And where Google goes with universal search, other search engines are sure to follow. In this article we examine basic SEO video tactics and also introduce some of the more advanced techniques.

The Rise of Internet Video

According to ComScore (http://www.comscore.com/press/release.asp?press=2660), another milestone date was Nov 2008 - when 12.7 Billions videos were viewed online in the US, up 34% from a year ago. Many of these views were from videos posted to video sharing sites such as YouTube, Yahoo and LiveSearch, with the remainder being hosted on individual user and corporate websites.

The value of video SEO optimization arises when significant traffic is due to natural search (with the rest being due to sharing between web users, random searching and from dedicated video websites.)

Video SEO Basics - File Sharing Sites

There are a number of SEO techniques being applied to optimizing video content. One of the most popular involves using a series of posted videos as ‘link bait’ - the idea being to have users link to, rank and comment on videos deliberately designed to tease, humor or provoke. In order to get these videos ranked more highly, smart marketers have been doing the following:

- Including keywords in the video title, tags and even in the filename.

- Adding ‘geosearch’ keywords in the tags field to target certain geographic and local search environment.

- Using automated distribution tools such as TubeMogul and Trafficgeyser to upload to multiple video file sharing sites.

Video SEO Basics - Hosted Websites

To some extent we are still hampered by the fact that video search engines are mostly 1st generation and thus unable to read and rank the actual video content. (There are some emerging search engines that can do a form of optical character recognition, along with speech recognition but these technologies are not yet mature.)

This limitation means that “search engine gaming” is going on - whereby people attempt to trick their way to higher rankings. However, legitimate approaches work well with time and effort and include the following:

- Creation of Google xml sitemaps according to their recommendations e.g. for Title, File size and Description character length.

See: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=80472&topic=10079 for information on “google video sitemaps”.

- Optimizing on-page factors such as adding a video transcript to the existing page content and including contextual links to other relevant videos and web pages.

- Use of RSS for media files (MRSS) to increase distribution and therefore backlinks.

- Adding video embed code so that viewers can easily add the video to their sites.

- Experimenting and testing the use of one video per URL (and making this a unique URL), including the use of “-video” in the url. Some SEO specialists recommend using a central, root-level folder to store these videos.

- Adding metadata such as author, date and description for videos uploaded to hosted websites (video file sharing sites usually remove this meta data information.) There are tools from Adobe and others to do this.

- Using Video thumbnails. Google is very keen on these.

http://googlevideo.blogspot.com/2009/01/calling-video-publishers.html

The Future Of Video SEO

Already there are startups hard at work developing the next generation of video search algorithms. Companies such as VideoSurf (with the aid of part venture capital from Al Gore) are pioneering techniques such as ‘multigrid fast computation’. The future will likely see search engines that can ‘read’, index and rank integrated media files based on user searches and contextual cues. And that will make Video SEO an even hotter topic that it is today.

Regards,
Mark McClure