Making video more visible means working on its appeal to video search engines. A morning panel at SES New York discussed Video Search Optimization.
Attendees headed to the Search Engine Strategies conference in New York under a mostly clear sky today. A session on video search and optimizing for the engines that index it awaited those hitting the Multimedia and Mobile Track at a running start.
SES: Pumping Up Video Search Optimization
Eric Papczun, Director of Natural Search, Performics, spoke about what he was seeing new in the world of video search. “These include file tagging which I refer to as ‘scene tagging’. These are often user generated tags. This allows viewers to just watch the parts of a video that pertain to you.”
One insight Eric gave involved the actual keyword, ‘video’; he believes there is still a good opportunity to brand a site to it as a keyword. “If you have a good position with the word ‘video’ with search engines, you are going to do well down the road.”
Don’t neglect paid search, either. Eric said search marketing can help you “capture complete and comprehensive real estate” when trying to reach online eyeballs. In the United States, some 123 million people watch video online; more than a quarter of them watch something at least once a week.
Google Video gathers most of that traffic, snaring about 68 percent of the relative share of viewers. YouTube’s popularity has continued to grow, even as major media companies like Viacom challenge the video sharing site over its practices.
There are other roadblocks to video that have to be overcome, as we are still in the early stages of its adoption. Taxonomies vary from producer to producer, as there is no consistent, simple list of terms to use for labeling content.
Finding video with conventional search depends on text from the video’s corresponding web page. Eric said links and anchor text are “still king” when it comes to Google’s video search.
Unattractive, SEO-unfriendly URLs can also hinder the indexing of videos. Just as many bloggers have been moving toward URL rewriting to make their posts more easily indexed by search engines, videos should benefit from a similar optimization approach.
