Thursday, January 8, 2009

Video Search Engine Marketing Tips and Guidelines

By Mark Robertson

If you perform a simple search on video search or video SEO, you will be bombarded with numerous articles that try to explain this technique. Video search optimization, or Video SEO (VSEO) is a new bug that has bitten the world recently. Though it's a new technique, still many companies have started using it aggressively to earn high ranking and more business.

To ensure that your video gets seen and discovered on these search engines, it is important to first learn some of the technical aspects that are important to online video as well as search.

There is misconception that, keyword research for video content is same as standard organic search or other search verticals. This is not true and moreover, till now there aren't keyword research tools to determine and measure video search results. Before you begin with your actual video search optimization, put together your keyword list. The list can be based on standard search results; however, they should be supplemented with results from news search engine results pages for more appropriate content. At this early phase of online video revolution, video searches at this point tend to be shorter keywords as opposed to "long tail" searches. More than any other piece of advice, make sure you include the word "video" in your keyword list. Examples - car videos, car video, racing video, automotive videos, etc....

Once you are through with this, next step is to look across the top video search platforms having the highest performance in overall views, ratings, and latency. The only way to measure your success is to view count.

As a side note, pay attention to the audience that is already searching for the terms that you identified in your keyword research. Are there closely related terms that you did not include? Take a look at videos that are similar in terms of the keywords that you are targeting and view the comments and feedback from users to find related terms.

Studies show that people who regularly provide user feedback tend to take frequent action on your uploaded video. This even includes visits to your actual website and end-point conversions.

If you can do this, it is always better to pick a video theme that is not saturated in terms of competition out there. As an example, a video about Tom Cruise will likely be very hard to optimize for as there are thousands of results for that search.

Nobody is interested in watching long and boring videos. Shoot or create short clips from your longer version of the video. This will make your video more interesting and crispier. People usually like to watch short clips online ranging from 1-3 minutes, as they are short and takes less time to download.

Finally, make sure that you take advantage of the fact that you can brand your video with a watermark logo, text for your URL, and additional information to get users back to your website or business. One of the main points for doing video SEO is to get users back to your destination.

Therefore, in order to get more visibility for your business, website, etc... search engine optimization for video is an excellent, and fairly new concept that you can take advantage of right now, while the buzz is hot. - 15478

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