Is video optimization a part of your search marketing strategy? It should be! Following on the coat-tails of Google, mainstream search engines understand the value of incorporating videos into their result pages (universal search). Videos are an excellent way to garner more exposure for your brand, educate consumers about your products and services, and boost ROI to your search marketing efforts.

Video Search

As embedded videos become commonplace within the natural search results, savvy marketers understand the huge impact that videos may have on their brand.

Videos can also be used to bring visitors directly to your site. And that’s the goal, isn’t it? Get viewers back to your website to explore your content and interact with your brand. Video search optimization can (and should be) a key component of your website’s SEO link-building strategy. With these video search optimization tips, you’ll be able to give your brand a jumpstart in this ever-changing landscape of universal search.

9 Tips for Video Optimization

1. Make it useful to your target audience. Provide users with information that may help them achieve something. Step-by-steps, how to’s, product reviews or responses to a breaking news story that’s relevant to your business. While branded commercials may help to increase brand awareness online, they will not snowball in the social media community and drive the results that you may be looking for.
2. Keep your video short and sweet. Stay on point and be sure to include your company’s logo to help further increase brand awareness. Corporate videos should be watermarked with your brand name or website url. This will tell users who created the content, and encourage type-in traffic from viewers seeking more information
3. Provide transcripts of your videos. Content is still king! It is important to give the search engines something to physically crawl and index. Do your best to surround the video with relevant content
4. Apply standard SEO best practices that you use on your own web pages when submitting your videos. Use important keyword phases in the Title, Description,etc.
5. “Tag” your video with keyword phrases that you want it to rank for. These tags should coincide with the keywords found in the Title and Description.
6. Look into video distributing services. Services such as Tube Mogul can help create submission and tracking efficiencies for all of your video assets.
7. Build out a video area on your own website. Use video.yourdomain.com (as an example) and be sure to follow best practices for internal linking, site architecture, etc. Include links back to your site when submitting your videos
8. Make it easy for others to post your videos elsewhere. Whether it’s on their personal pages or favorite social media sites, including links to common file formats that other video engines accept (.avi, .MOV, .MPG, etc.) gets your video noticed. Provide copy and paste coding to your video source
9. Syndicate your video like you would other products and services on your website (submit to RSS feeds, include social bookmarking widgets such as Ad This)

Labels: icrossing, universal search, video optimization