Ben Wills

Thursday, December 7th, 2006

Video Search Optimization, Top 10 Tips

I first have to give credit to the following people’s knowledge, experience and their willingness to share some great ideas here at SES and at PubCon. All of their presentations have been both excellent and informative.:

• Gregory Markel, Infuse Creative
• Adam Beguelin, AOL Video Search
• Suranga Chandratillake, Blinkx
• John Leicht, Intuit
• David Clarke, SearchForVideo.com
• David Ives, TVEyes Inc.
• Eric Papczun, Performics

And now…onto the good stuff. ;-)

Social video usage stats are becoming both staggering and hard to ignore:

• “The market for video is doubling every 6 months” – Adam Beguelin, Aol Video Search
• “54% of online users watch video” – Eric Papczun, Performics
• “72% of video viewers watch news online” – Eric Papczun, Performics

And my favorite quote of Day 1 at SES Chicago:

“Optimization of video for search is like optimizing your website for AltaVista in the late ’90s.” - Gregory Markel, Infuse Creative

To make sure that your videos don’t get lost with the millions of others that are out there, follow these ten tips for success:

Host Your Video on Your Site:

1. Make Your Videos Accessible to as Many People as Possibile
   • Encode your video into different formats to cater to multiple types of users.
   • Viewers will generally always view the higher-bandwidth, but you may want to consider having a lower-bandwidth download as well.
2. Submit Your Video to Video Search Engines
   • Infuse Creative makes a great tool for submitting your videos to the top video search engines. If anyone has that link, let me know and I’ll add it to the post ;)
   • Blinkx Submit Page
   • Singingfish Submit Page
   • SearchForVideo.com Submit Page (RSS Submit)
3. Add Meta Data to Your Files
   • Research keywords with a tool like
     • Google’s Keyword Sandbox (Free)
     • Yahoo!’s Search Term Tool (Free)
     • KeywordDiscovery (Paid)
     • WordTracker (Paid)
   • When encoding your video to different file formats, YOU WILL LOSE THE META DATA. Be sure to add it again post-encoding.
   • Use software like AutoDesk Cleaner XL (PC) (Formerly Discreet Cleaner) or AutoDesk Cleaner (Mac) (Formerly Media Cleaner) software to edit your meta data.
4. Create a page that hosts the video and optimize that page via the same means as you would organic search engine optimization.
   • This will help for ranking in both video search engines and organic searches for things like: “[keyword] video”
5. Place all of your video content in your video directory and create a Video Sitemap.
   • This will help video search engines more easily find your video content, and will help to increase the relevance of your videos for organic search engines.
6. Create an RSS feed/Atom Feed/iTunes Feed/MRSS feed for your videos.
   • Similarly to a podcast, if you have a show with episodes, create a separate feed for each show. If you just have random videos etc, one feed will do.

Distribute Your Video to Video Content Providers:

7. Submit your video in the highest encoding quality as possible within each site’s guidelines.
   • One theory is that the video quality can actually gain more visibility, but a higher quality also means a greater chance for services that transcribe audio for content to use in ranking algorithms…that’s a good thing.
   • The top providers are YouTube, MySpace, Google Video, AOL Video, Yahoo! Video
8. Optimize your listings with keywords
   • Title Tags.
   • Description.
   • And any other fields that you are able to optimize.
   • Again, use a keyword research tool like Keyword Discovery.

Get the word out!

9. Bookmark your video links in Dabble, a social bookmarking site for videos.
   • Also include links in your own social bookmark lists as well.
10. To help create action and branding, and to drive traffic to your website, add a watermark to your video with your company/URL and create a call to action at the end of the video.
    • For an even greater response rate, incentivise your viewers to take action. ;)

11. BONUS! If your video is content that is newsworthy with a short shelf-life, or your frequently generate videos based on news:
    • Use Yahoo! Buzz to do market research
    • Buy relevant Pay-Per-Click ads
    • Get your video online THAT DAY
    • Submit your video to video search engines THAT DAY.

So, go get rolling!

Monday, December 4th, 2006

Video Search Interview on WebProNews

Chris Richardson was kind enough to not only listen to me talk about the cool video search marketing stuff that’s out there now, but also was kind enough to interview me and put it up on WebProNews.

Here’s a link to the video. Or watch it below ;)