http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vLp9Qf99DCI

Three videos that cover some of the basics

17% of all results were universal search results, and 58% of those who searched Google saw a universal result at least one time. By a large margin, most saw video and news, followed by images and maps/stocks/weather.

usevideofoesearchengineoptimisation61

But just how popular is online video? On November 10, 2010, YouTube reported that users are uploading 35 hours worth of video every minute! That’s a huge increase of 12 hours per minute in just 6 months!

So, which types of video are popular among users? As you can see in the graph below, user-generated videos are on top of the list, followed by news, music videos, and movie previews.

And what do people do after seeing a video? The data from the Kelsey Group indicates that most people visit a website after seeing a video ad (43%).

Here are some more online video statistics (from Tammy Camp):

If you want to optimize your Youtube videos for SEO, here are the things you have to keep an eye on.

Title Text

Keep in mind that YouTube only allows for 99 characters in the video title, so use it wisely. Do your keyword research, consider your target keywords and any other keywords you may want to rank for. And since the main goal here is branding, you may want to include your brand in your video’s title, too.

Description

YouTube allows for up to 5,000 characters in the video description. It will be best that you use all that space to write as much about your video as possible. And don’t forget to include your site’s URL in the description, too. You might just be able to get some traffic from it. (Note: YouTube will turn your URL into a link if you enter your site URL in this format: http://www.yoursite.com.) You can also ask people to rate, share, and embed your video in your description.

usevideofoesearchengineoptimisation55

Tags

Tags are useful for search terms you use in your title text and description, including names and branding

Broadcasting and Sharing Options

1)   Privacy – Obviously, you need to set your video to “public” before people can view it.

2)   Comments – It’s up to you whether you’d allow people to comment on your video or not. Keep in mind that even if you disallow comments, people can and probably will comment on it somewhere else.

3)   Video responses – Enabling video responses can help boost your video’s views because video responses are automatically linked to your original.

4)   Ratings – Ratings have a direct impact on how your video’s ranking, so make sure to set ratings to “yes.”

5)   Embedding – Blogs and social media shares can boost your video’s views. Additionally, it can also help your message get to new audiences outside of YouTube. So, allow people to embed your video.

6)   Syndication – Anything that can boost your views will help your video rank higher in YouTube and Google, so keep this enabled.

Spread Your Video

a)    Embed your YouTube video in your company blog or on product pages

b)    Post your videos to your Facebook page.

c)     Encourage others to share your video on social media platforms within the video itself by asking people to share it in your video itself and in the description.

d)   Drop your video’s link on bookmarking and listing sites.

e)    If you have money to spare, you can also promote your video through PPC ad campaigns.

Some Video Sharing Sites

URL: http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/

Note: You need to have a Google Account to be able to submit your feeds to Google.

Sign into Google Webmaster Tools with your Google Account.

Click on the Add a site button.

Type the URL of the site you want to add in the field provided. Make sure you type the entire URL. For example: http://www.example.com/

usevideofoesearchengineoptimisation6

Click Continue.

On the Site verification page, choose your preferred verification method.

Follow the instructions and click on the Verify button.

Once your site has been verified, click on it in your Google Webmaster Tools account home page.

On the Dashboard, click on the More link under Sitemaps.

Click on the Submit a Sitemap button.

Enter your Sitemap’s location in the field provided and click on the Submit Sitemap button.

Yahoo Site Explorer

URL: http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit

Go to http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit

Login to your Yahoo! account.

Click on the Submit a Website or Webpage link

Enter your site’s URL in the field provided and click on the Submit URL button.

Click on the Submit Your Site link to go back to the main site submission menu.

This time, click on Submit Site Feed.

Enter the URL/location of your site feed or Sitemap in the field provided and click on the Submit Feed button.

If you are forwarded to the page shown below

Simply enter the location of your site’s feed or Sitemap again, without the main domain.

For example, if your feed is located on http://www.example.com/?feed=rss2, all you need to enter now is the ?feed=rss2 part.

Then, click on the Add Feed button.

Bing Webmaster Tools

URL: http://www.bing.com/toolbox/webmasters/

Go to http://www.bing.com/toolbox/webmasters/

Login to your account.

Enter your site’s URL in the field provided and click on the Submit button.

Choose your preferred verification method and follow the instructions.

Once you’ve done what you’re told to on your site, click on the Verify my site now button.

Click on the Add Sitemaps link.

Enter your site’s Sitemap in the field provided and click on the Submit button.

usevideofoesearchengineoptimisation47

Video Transcripts

A great way to enable the search engines’ bots/spiders/crawlers to index the content of your video is to provide them with a transcript. Create a keyword-rich title for the transcript and a brief synopsis of its subject matter.

Google prefers transcripts that are time-coded and saved as a .txt file. A time-coded transcript breaks the script of the video into segments. Each segment is marked by the time the words in the script are being mentioned in the video followed by the actual words of the script.

The time stamp of each segment is listed in the following format: HH:MM:SS.mmm.

HH: Hours starting at 00

MM: Minutes starting at 00

SS: Seconds starting at 00

mmm: Milliseconds starting at 000

Your time-coded transcript would look something like this:

9:54:50.000

Words said between 09:54:50.000 and 09:54:53.000

9:54:53.000

Words said between 09:54.53.000 and the next segment.

9:54:54.000

Words said at 09:54:54.000

Publish Your Transcript

You could put a link under your videos that point to their transcript that, when clicked on, would either take the visitor to the video’s transcript or let him download it. Displaying a transcript of your video can help improve your rankings for your chosen keywords at Google and the other engines.

Other Factors To Consider

Title Tags

Some people believe that having matching titles for the video and the page it is on will give the video a good chance in appearing and ranking in Google’s search results page.

Long Tail Search Terms

Like in traditional SEO, you’ve got better chances of seeing results with Video SEO if you target more specific, longer tail, search terms. A video with a title “Dog” is unlikely to produce a first-page ranking, while a video titled “German Shepherd Police Dog” will be more likely to score well in Google’s algorithm.

Fewer Ranking Factors

Much of the factors that Google uses in ranking web pages are not applicable to video SEO such as the number of pages on a site, the number of backlinks a site has and where they are coming from, and the age of the site.

None of those matter in video SEO. As such, everyone has an equal chance of having their video appear on Google’s universal search results.

Thumbnail

You can tell Google which thumbnail to display for your video when it appears on the search results page. You do this by using the optional “thumbnail_loc” tag in your XML video Sitemap. The tag looks like this:

<video:thumbnail_loc>http://www.eample.com/thumbs/example.jpg</video:thumbnail_loc>

Another is the media:thumbnail tag which is used in the MRSS. It looks like this:

<media:thumbnail url=”http://www.example.com/thumbs/example.jpg” />

Keep in mind to optimize your thumbnail images for 80 x 60 pixels (or 4:3 aspect ratio dimensions).

Enabling Sharing

Enabling interaction and sharing helps to generate inbound links and buzz about your brand. And when that happens, search engines will discover and rank your content faster. So, heed these tips:

1)   Allow visitors to grab and share your videos

2)   Create easy links for users (permalinks)

3)   Enable commenting and rating, this creates relevant text and promotes buzz

4)   Allow users to subscribe to your videos via RSS/MRSS

5)   Include social bookmarking tools

Video Content

Actual video footage, screen captures, slide shows, or animated PowerPoint slides—it doesn’t really matter what you have on your video. At least not yet. Google (and all the other search engines for that matter) are not yet able to “see” the contents of videos.

So how does it determine which videos to include in its search results?

Well, it’s currently relying on the videos’ title and other meta-data to determine what content the videos actually contain.

XML Video Site Maps

We’ve already mentioned that Google cannot “see” or “read” videos like it does other web content (i.e., text). So, the best way to have your video appear in Google’s universal search results is to submit your video to Google using an XML video sitemap.

A video sitemap is very similar to a regular XML sitemap, except that it is formatted specifically for video, and that it only contains information about your video content.

Here’s an example of a video sitemap:

<url>

<loc>http://example.com/video/</loc>

<video:video>

<video:title>Sitemap Example Video</video:title>

<video:publication_date>

2010-06-17T18:00:00UTC

</video:publication_date>

<video:player_loc allow_embed=”yes”>

http://example.com/video/player.swf

</video:player_loc>

<video:content_loc>

http://example.com/video/video.mp4

</video:content_loc>

<video:thumbnail_loc>

http://example.com/video/poster.png

</video:thumbnail_loc>

<video:description>

example description of a sitemap example video

</video:description>

<video:category>Example Videos</video:category>

<video:tag>Examples</video:tag>

<video:tag>Videos</video:tag>

<video:tag>Xml Sitemap</video:tag>

<video:duration>180</video:duration>

</video:video>

</url>

As you can see in the sample above, a video sitemap contains URLs containing a video section that outlines all the details about the video (e.g., its location, the player’s location, and keywords).

Media RSS (MRSS)

Wikipedia defines Media RSS as “an RSS extension used for syndicating multimedia files (audio, video, image) in RSS feeds.”

Media RSS is a standard developed by Yahoo!, but one that Google fully supports for discovering rich media such as images and video.

The downside to MRSS is that, since it’s just an add-on to the RSS feed, it will only contain your last several posts (10, 20, or 100) even if you have hundreds of posts and pages containing video.

However, because of its nature it gets indexed very regularly, allowing for fast inclusion of your video in Google’s index.

Following is an example of a MRSS:

<media:content

url=”http://example.com/video/video.mp4″

medium=”video”

duration=”180″>

<media:player

url=”http://example.com/video/player.swf?file=video.mp4″ />

<media:thumbnail

url=”http://example.com/video/poster.png”/>

<media:title type=”html”>Sitemap Example Video</media:title>

<media:description type=”html”>

Example description of a sitemap example video

</media:description>

<media:keywords>

Examples,Videos,XML Sitemap

</media:keywords>

</media:content>

Yahoo! Searchmonkey (RDFa)

As you can see in its name, Yahoo! Searchmonkey is another Yahoo! standard. And Google supports it, too.

According to Google:

Google recognizes two video markup formats: Facebook Share and Yahoo! SearchMonkey RDFa. Using either (or both) of these formats to mark up video directly in your HTML helps Google better understand and present your video content. To help Google discover video markup on your pages, make sure the markup appears in the HTML without the execution of JavaScript or Flash. (Note: You can also tell Google about your video content by creating and submitting a Video Sitemap.)

Unlike site maps and RSS feeds, Yahoo! Searchmonkey code goes straight into your pages. This means that you don’t have to submit any additional sitemaps or feeds for Google to find and recognize your videos.

Here’s what it looks like:

<object width=”512″ height=”296″

rel=”media:video”

resource=”http://example.com/video_object.swf?id=12345″

xmlns:media=”http://search.yahoo.com/searchmonkey/media/”

xmlns:dc=”http://purl.org/dc/terms/”>

<param name=”movie” value=”http://example.com/video_object.swf?id=12345″ />

<embed src=”http://example.com/video_object.swf?id=12345″

type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” width=”512″ height=”296″>

<a rel=”media:thumbnail” href=”http://example.com/thumbnail_preview.jpg” />

<a rel=”dc:license” href=”http://example.com/terms_of_service.html” />

<span property=”dc:description”

content=”Example description.” />

<span property=”media:title” content=”Example title” />

<span property=”media:width” content=”512″ />

<span property=”media:height” content=”296″ />

<span property=”media:type” content=”application/x-shockwave-flash” />

<span property=”media:region” content=”us” />

<span property=”media:region” content=”uk” />

<span property=”media:duration” content=”63″ />

</object>

Facebook Share

If you’ve been paying close attention, you would have already seen this mentioned in the quote from Google earlier regarding the Yahoo! SearchMonkey.

Facebook Share is probably one of the simplest methods of telling Google about the presence of video on a page. It uses META elements in the head section of a page to point to a video file, poster image, size etc.

Here’s what it looks like:

<meta name=”title” content=”Example title” />

<meta name=”description” content=”Example description” />

<link rel=”image_src” href=”http://example.com/thumbnail_preview.jpg” />

<link rel=”video_src” href=”http://example.com/video_object.swf?id=12345″/>

<meta name=”video_height” content=”296″ />

<meta name=”video_width” content=”512″ />

<meta name=”video_type” content=”application/x-shockwave-flash” />

In April 2010, Nielsen reported that 72% of Internet users (or about 144 million people) view videos online. This presents marketers with a huge audience to reach.

Nielsen’s study (where over 14,000 surveys were conducted) revealed that video ads run during online full-episode TV programs yield deeper brand impact compared to on-air TV ads.

Nielsen attributes this to the following:

1)   Data shows that web video viewers are more engaged and attentive to the programs they are watching. Nielsen thinks that this is probably caused by the viewing environment and the oft-required active mouse-clicking to initiate and continue content.

2)   After all these years, online video is still a relative novelty compared to traditional forms of media. As such, people’s interest in online videos is still very high.

3)   Video ads online are less intrusive and users have the ability to skip ads whenever they want.

Although the Nielsen study mentioned above is focused on online video ads, it provides us with a good idea of what online videos can do for your marketing campaigns.

Online video, if used wisely, can be one of the most powerful tools an online marketer can use. As a matter of fact, there is no good reason for any marketer to not incorporate online video in his/her marketing effort.

Take a look at these statistics (compiled by Invodo):

• Online retailer Living Direct found that videos boosted conversion as well as increasing time on site by 9%. (Internet Retailer, October 2010).

• Internet Retailer reports that visitors who view product videos are 85% more likely to buy than visitors who do not, based on OnlineGolf.com results. (Internet Retailer, April 2010)

• Retail site visitors who view video stay two minutes longer on average and are 64% more likely to purchase than other site visitors. (Comscore, August 2010)

• In tests, merchants such as Archie McPhee experienced conversion rate increases averaging 30%, with a range from 12% to 115%. (Practical Ecommerce, November 2008)

• According to Internet Retailer, Shoeline.com saw a 44% increase in online sales conversions by using videos to showcase their products. (Internet Retailer, January 2009)

• Zappos reports a 6% to 30% increases in sales for products with video. (ReelSEO, December 2009)

• Discovery Channel increased video streams 123% by properly implementing video sitemaps

• 20% of all males surveyed cited online video as a significant influence in recent purchases of jewelry and watches. (Ad-ology Media Influence on Consumer Choice survey, September 2008)

• Ice.com found that viewers who chose to view video converted at a 400% increase over those who did not. Ice.com also credits video with decreasing returns by 25%. (Internet Retailer, December 2009)

• Implementation of video decreased returns by 27% for PFI Western. (Videocommerce.org, December 2009)

• Simple video merchandising best practices can nearly double the impact of eCommerce video (Invodo research, February 2010)

• Shoppers who view video at Onlineshoes.com convert at a 45% higher rate than other shoppers, and the site has seen a 359% year-over-year increase in video views. Product pages with video have higher conversion rates than product pages without video. (Internet Retailer, February 2010)

• Video in email marketing has been shown to increase click-through rates by over 96%. (Implix 2010 Email Marketing Trends Survey)

• Consumer packaged goods firm Reckitt Benckiser found that online video delivered a 6% increase in in-store sales. (Reckitt Benckiser / Nielsen, May 2010)

• Rich media ads containing video increase purchase intent by 1.16% and drive success more than four times that of Flash animation. In addition to the increase in purchase intent, video ads appear to increase consumer brand loyalty. Viewers favored a brand 2.30% more when exposed to rich media with a video ad opposed the tiny 0.15% increase simple Flash animation experienced. (DoubleClick, The Brand Value of Rich Media Ads, June 2009)

• Over 90% of shoppers surveyed found video useful in making purchase decisions, according to a study of Swimwear Boutique customers. (Internet Retailer, October 2010)

• From July 2009 through July 2010, the number of US video viewers on retail sites grew 40%, outpacing 17% growth in the number of total US online video viewers. 96% of online shoppers also watch online video. (Comscore, August 2010)

• Video views doubled from 14.8 billion to 33.2 billion between January 2009 and December 2009. 86.5% of all US Internet users watched online video during the month. The average viewer watched 187 videos and 12.7 hours of online video during the month. (Comscore, February 2010)

• A minute of video is worth 1.8 million words according to Dr. James McQuivey of Forrester Research. (Forrester, January 2009)

In addition, MeFeedia’s study shows that consumers are considerably more engaged when watching video on their mobile devices compared to desktop and laptop computers. Analyzing 125,000 mobile users, MeFeedia found that:

• iPad users, on average, will stick with a video for five minutes

• Symbian users for 4.1 minutes

• Android users for 3 minutes

• iPhone users for 2.4 minutes

Advantages of Video SEO

1)   According to a recent study by Forrester Research, video SEO is 53 times more likely to produce a first-page search result than traditional techniques.

Elliott writes on his blog on Forrester.com:

On the keywords for which Google offers video results, we found an average of 16,000 videos vying to appear on results pages containing an average of 1.5 video results—giving each video about an 11,000-to-1 chance of making it onto the first page of results. By comparison, there were an average of 4.7 million text pages competing for a place on results pages with an average of just 9.4 text results—giving each text page about a 500,000-to-1 chance of appearing on the first page of results.

2)   Google and other search engines are working to have mixed content types displayed on their search results. Because of this, they are giving a higher ranking to video content than other forms of Web content to make sure that searches are consistently returning mixed search results.

3)   With video SEO, it only takes a few days for results to appear. And some people had been able to get more than 25 percent of their videos to produce first page results.

4)   Search engines can’t find video content on their own, so getting submission right is critical. And that means more control for you.

Two Types of Video SEO

There are two types of Video SEO—hosted and posted.

• Hosted video SEO pertains to the optimization of video content that is on your site.

• Posted video SEO is the optimization of video content uploaded or syndicated to video sharing sites (e.g., YouTube), social media websites, etc.

Posted Video SEO

You might be thinking that since Google owns YouTube, it’s probably a good idea to upload your video there.

Well, uploading your video to YouTube does come with the benefit of getting your video indexed into Google’s search engine with less effort than on other video sharing sites/platforms. In addition to that, it also:

1.     let’s you take advantage of a large audience and viral social nature

2.     let’s you take advantage of pre-established authority and rankings

3.     can show up multiple times in the SERPs

4.     works with or without a strong website presence

However, do note that although it will ensure that Google will know that your content exists, uploading your video on YouTube will not guarantee that your video will appear on Google’s search result page.

Another drawback to this is that if your video on YouTube does get ranked in Google’s search results page, people who click on your video will be sent to YouTube and not to your site. This is actually fine if your goal is branding. But if you’re after the traffic, as is typically the case with SEO, this will not be an effective method.

If your goal is to generate traffic from video SEO, there’s no better place to put your video on than your own site.

Hosted Video SEO

When your goal is to generate traffic to your site and your video content, hosting your videos on your own site is the way to go.

Hosting your video(s) on your site offers the following benefits:

• Control (on-page text, user-experience, action/conversions, brand experience)
• Better measurement capabilities
• Generate traffic directly
• Exposure to related content
• It can strengthen overall website SEO

In our Members Area we provide a number of tools and tutorials to easily allow our clients to create and upload videos to assist with their online SEO

Just a few of these Traffic Generation strategies include.

• Search Engine Optimization (both on-page and off)
• Article Marketing
• Press Releases
• Blogging/RSS Feed Syndication
• Social Bookmarking
• Utilizing “Web 2.0″ properties (like Twitter.com, Facebook.com, etc.)
• Video Marketing (like YouTube.com, Viddler.com, etc.)
• Online Classifieds (like Craigslist.org, Kijiji.com, etc.)
• And a whole lot more!
Whether you are looking to make direct sales from your website, build leads or encourage your visitors to stop by your store or office, we can develop a traffic generation strategy to meet your objectives.

There are a number of “off-page SEO tactics” but the most important one is how many links your site has “pointing at it” from other websites/pages across the internet.
If you’d like to get a general idea of how many links the search engines have found for your site, do this…
1. Go to Yahoo.com and enter the following into the search box: link:www.yourdomain.com (replacing “yourdomain.com” with your actual domain name).
2. Click the button to conduct your search.
3. This will take you to the “Yahoo Site Explorer” as shown above. Once on this page, select “Except from this domain” from the “Show Inlinks” drop-down menu so Yahoo will only show you the links it found from the other sites that are linking to you.
The more links your site has, the better.
This is because each link can be thought of as a “vote” for your site. The search engines figure that if others like your site well enough to link to it, then it probably contains valuable information.
This is why we use Article Marketing, Web 2.0 Strategies and a variety of other techniques to continually build links for our clients.

Basically, your on-page SEO should accomplish three main objectives:

• Your website’s code (illustrated by the code from Walmart.com above) should be well-coded. By this, I mean that it should be easily read and understood by search engines.
• Each page of your website should be built around “intelligent keyword phrases” that are likely to draw targeted visitors to your page/site.
• Your site’s design should be attractive and your content found useful to visitors so as to encourage them to stay as long as possible on your site.
One on-page SEO tactic that isn’t even widely discussed it what is called “Visitor Experience Optimization.” (aka VEO)
Google (and other search engines) have the ability to track how long the average visitor stays on your website and gives added benefit to sites that have a longer than average “visitor duration.”
It stands to reason, right?

If the majority of your website visitors hit the “BACK” button after being on your site for only three seconds, it could be assumed that they either didn’t like what they saw or they didn’t find something they felt was relevant to what they were searching for.
However, if your visitors stay on your site for 1-3 minutes (or more), the search engines will give you a boost in the search engine rankings as your visitors have “spoken.” They obviously have liked something about your site long enough to hang around and therefore, your site is believed to contain “valuable” content.
This is one of the reasons that it’s wise to consider adding an “involvement device” to your website. This could include getting your visitor to sign-up for your company newsletter (to receive a coupon or other free gift), adding video to your website or simply allowing them to comment on the content you’ve posted.
All three options help your visitors connect with you in a more personal way than just having the ability to read your website’s content and can help you bring you more business in addition to helping your site rank better in the search engines.

The structure of your web page is important for SEO.Wordpress has many built in SEO advantages. We use a premium plugin – SEO Beast which makes it easy to get good SEO for our posts and pages.