Article Written By: Marcus Richard
According to the latest research, not only is online video the fastest growing media online, but is has now surpassed search as the most popular activity online. Online video views surpassed searches performed on the top 5 search engines, according to stats released by comScore and covered by ReelSEO.Online video, combined with search, is one of the most effective ways to drive internet users to your videos and market your products and services. However, being that online video marketing is such a new strategy, there are still many aspects of video marketing that are not well understood. For online marketers and video content producers, it is important to learn and practice techniques that increase the likelihood that internet users will discover their content via the major search engines. To do this, one must understand video search optimization, also known as video SEO. To start off, let's answer the simple question, "What is Video SEO, or SEO for Video?" Basically, it is the process of creating and publishing a video such that it is easily discovered, indexed, and ranked by search engines. When we talk about video SEO, there are really 2 distinct strategies and methods to consider.One strategy for video SEO is that which we call "Posted" video SEO. Essentially, this is when you optimize video content that is uploaded to video websites like Youtube and Yahoo. With "Posted" video SEO, the strategy is to generate as many views as possible for your videos. Uploading your video to these sites allows you to draw upon the massive audience of viewers that these sites already have. In addition, because these websites have a pre-existing authority and page rank with the search engines, this is an effective strategy to leverage these sites to obtain rankings within organic and universal search.When optimizing your video for uploading ("posted" video SEO), it is very important that you choose your target keywords wisely and include these in your titles, descriptions, tags, comments, etc... There are also many services available on the web that allow you to upload your videos to multiple video sharing websites at once. Although there are a few tactics that can help, for the most part, a "posted" strategy does not assist well with driving traffic back to your own website.In addition to "Posted" video search optimization, there are many techniques and strategies for "hosted" video SEO, or "website" video SEO. With this, the goal is to optimize video content that is placed on your own website. With universal search on the rise, it is possible to utilize video content to increase your own website's chances of ranking in the major search engines as well as the video search engines. The main benefit in this strategy is that you can expose potential viewers to your other business assets, products and services.For "hosted" video SEO strategy, it is most crucial that you consider it a holistic approach to website optimization and follow general best practices for optimizing website content. That being said, because search engines can not yet understand the content within a video, it is most important that you optimize your pages utilizing on-page text that is relevant to your video content. There are many tips and techniques for "hosted" video SEO. The following tips are crucial:1) When including video on a web page, make certain that you populate the page with relevant on-page text. 2)Take advantage of captions, transcripts, related links, meta tags, etc... 3) Publish all your videos within the same directory or subdomain and keep each video on its own unique URL. 4) Create a video sitemap and offer an MRSS feed so that search engines can more easily find and index your video content. 5) Let users share and link to your video in order to increase the off-page linking to your video pages.Whether your strategy is to drive visits to your video or to your website in general, video SEO is an effective way to leverage the power of online video. If you are interested in learning more advanced tips and techniques for either "posted" or "hosted" video content, ReelSEO is the website to visit. They are the only site completely focused on providing resources and information for Video SEO. Good luck and much success to you and your video optimization efforts.
This Article Has Been Published on Sat, 26 Sep 2009 and Read 162 Times