It’s no secret that online video is popular, from Hulu to YouTube the number of Americans watching video continues to increase. In the SES session “The Next Wave for Online Video,” the panelists focused on optimizing online video for search and other strategies.
Coverage of the SES San Jose conference continues at murdok Videos. Stay with murdok for more notes and videos from the event this week.
Gregory Markel
Founder/President
Infuse Creative, LLC
Gregory Markel, Founder/President, Infuse Creative, said video search optimization is not enough anymore. Video has gone social and mobile. A good strategy implements both.
Consider all the elements surrounding ranking on YouTube, including view counts, frequency, rating, sharing, favoriting, playlists, flagging, comments and thumbs up and down. There is a lot of speculation that Google is using Google analytics to influence website ranking. It makes sense that this would apply to YouTube as well.
Additional YouTube ranking factors are whether you have been awarded an authority channel (one box results), links, embeds video responses, subscribers, channel views and annotation usage.
Optimization keywords and tags:
– Research the competition at YouTube for your related keywords, tags and description. Learn from them but don’t copy.
– Use YouTube’s keyword suggestions. Or Google’s keyword tool. Simply type a keyword slowing into YouTube search and you can see what YouTube suggests.
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Also use YouTube public insight data to help you optimize.
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Tips for optimizing community factors:
– Make great and unique videos.
-Add subscribe, favorite and rate prompts/ calls to action to your videos either at editing stage or via YouTube Annotations.
– Post a video response on the most popular and relevant video at YouTube that day.
= Add comments prompting people to watch your video on the video watch pages of popular videos.
– Use some but not all the same keyword’s as your competition in your titles as the ones related to popular videos that are using in their titles, descriptions and tags to wind up in the related videos arena of their pages.
– Post new videos on Thursdays or Fridays to get visibility on the weekend.
– Join the YouTube partner program if you can qualify.
– Important: Use social media and web sites to submit/post your video links and imbeds and get the word out about the video to build links and embeds. Target affinity groups/users and automate this effort with tools like tweetdeck and Tweetlater.
– Submit your videos to multiple video sites using tubemogul.com and link to the YouTube video within each description page.
– Link your videos together
– Create Playlists.
– Monitor YouTube Insight and Google Analytics for your channel and videos
– Issue free and or paid press releases to trumpet your video.
– Adwords – advertise your video.
– YouTube Direct Sales. Buy brand channel, homepage and network placement $$$$
– Buy or lease a popular channel at YouTube
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The iPhone 3G S has a built in ability to upload video to YouTube
1 shoot a video on your iPhone
2 add keyword optimized title, description and tags.
3. Upload to YouTube.
Erin Bouchier, Business Lead, Google/YouTube Advertising, said online video is the fastest growing medium in the history of the world. Your customers are there and you should be too.
Ways to connect with your audience:
– Know your audience by using YouTube Insight tool.
– Be Proactive: Promote Your Video using PPC tools similar to search. This can significantly increase viewership of your videos.
– Create a brand channel on YouTube. YouTube can post all of your videos on one place branded to your site for free.
– Don’t forget about the content. You can run TV style ads within videos in 15-30 second spot preroll or midroll.
Mark Robertson, Founder, ReelSEO, said YouTube is now the second largest search engine in terms of search queries. In July 2009 there were 3.6 million search queries on YouTube.
– Social media + video working together
– More efforts into video discovery and retrieval.
– Mobile video is going crazy. There is a 1700 % increase from Jan July 2009 in this area.
The next wave in video SEO:
– Html 5 and open video — Firefox 3.5, safari, chrome beta
– There is a lot of progress with advanced recognition technologies such as speech to texts, object recognition and facial recognition.
Tip: How to get a thumbnail in universal search…
– Allow direct link to video file,
– Submit MRSS and or XML sitemap to Google
– Add relevant video to existing ranked pages.
David Burch, Director of Marketing, TubeMogul, said videos are mostly discovered through YouTube searches. The next most common source is referred videos, but not single source dominates. Search engines only refer about 11 percent of referred traffic.
A view only means someone clicked paly. On average most people don’t watch much of a video. Within 30 seconds over 66 percent of initial viewers have already clicked away.
The life cycle of a video peaks very early. So you want to have call to action early in videos and you also want to have a lot of videos to fight these two trends.
YouTube dominates in terms of average views per video. However, if you syndicate to just 6 more video sites you can double your viewership.
