Optimizing Videos for Search Engines

Here is a small list of ways to optimize videos for search engines:

1. You should optimize not only for video search engines, but also for content search engines. A good approach would be to use meta tags for the content (text) of the page where your video is placed.
2. Make sure you give relevant names to your videos. It’s highly improbable that your video will show up in the SERPs if it is called "12032002.mov" rather than "XYZ- antivirus-demo.mov".
3. Use keywords in the video titles and their descriptions. Video search engines will find it much easier to index your video files and link it to your web pages.
4. Use anchor text if you link to the video from other pages of your Web site.
5. Make sure the video files you submit have the proper extension.
6. Make it short. Say in 2 minutes what would take a normal person 10 minutes to read on paper (or on a Web page).
7. SEO professionals recommend creating separate video site maps, which can be submitted to video and content search engines alike. Both kinds of SEs will index these site maps.
8. Remember to include RSS feeds. Metadata can be inserted here.
9. Research, measure, test, report and optimize.

It is important not just to take the video you made and put it in a video directory and just sit back and wait for it to bring you loads of prospects. The road to a nice result is similar to the regular Search Engine Optimization (SEO) way. Bear in mind that videos are a gourmet dish for search engines, so it’s best that you take some time and prepare it accordingly.

Technology today offers you many opportunities to track traffic and analyze results. Take your time and make an effort (which will be rewarded in the end) to measure the impact that your videos have had on the prospects and to measure their performance. Search for tools that can tell you how much of your video was played before the visitor closed it, how many prospects actually decided to pay your site a visit after watching your video add on a different website, how many of these visits converted into sales, and so on.

Just because you have invested some time and effort in one or several videos, it doesn’t mean that you should leave out content. It’s still an important part of your business. Offer your visitors enough information on the site. Remember that marketing videos are meant to promote your business, to inspire Web surfers to visit your site and, luckily, convert into sales.

Many experts advise to use the videos on the first page. It’s like handing out your business card. The first page recommends you, and we all know that first impression counts. Don’t tuck your marketing video away, on some page that a visitor might not even get to. Make it visible. Anyway, give your site visitors the opportunity to skip your video. Maybe they’re not in the mood for watching it, and the last thing you want is an annoyed visitor.

When to Use Video

Marketing videos can be used when a company decides to promote, a bit more aggressively (in the good way), one or more of its products/services. They can help reach the prospects better, on a well-trodden path, that of visual advertising, laid before them by television. Given that more and more people nowadays turn to Internet in search of information, Internet marketing videos come naturally to supplement the Web user’s need for new, for useful, for sensational.

Advantages of Video Advertising

If you decide to use video in your marketing campaigns, it’s a very good option. It is catchier than other types of advertising. It captures the Web user’s attention easier and transports your message to prospects much faster than simple text.

A video ad can contain a demonstration of a product’s use and usability. Add to that a human face and a very pleasant voice (or even a well harmonized combination of a woman’s voice with a man’s), and you can have your prospects wrapper around your finger. By using these techniques, the prospective customer can relate more to your company and to what you’re promoting.

Video marketing is an efficient means of reaching prospective customers, of promoting the presentation of your products or services. The use of videos on the Internet brings numerous advantages. It is a great solution with great impact on the visitor. It combines the advantages of "classic" TV advertising with the Internet’s most important characteristic, interactivity.

The ad becomes thus more attractive to the Web surfer, who becomes more receptive to what you have to offer. Online marketing is therefore more cost effective than regular TV ads because it’s less expensive to produce and disseminate and it makes customer targeting a lot easier too.

Online video marketing, in my opinion, is a marketing strategy used by companies in order to promote products and services, by making use of short, catchy, informative videos, with the purpose of inducing awareness to the prospective customers about the promoted products/services and enticing them into purchasing the products/services.

Common Characteristics of Online Video Marketing

It is obvious that people enjoy more to watch TV or view something on their computer than reading. Information is delivered at a higher rate via images than through text.

The main advantage that Internet marketing videos have over the traditional, text format approach is that videos can get to the point much faster and waste less of the precious time of prospective customers. Instead of having the Web users go over some pages of text, trying to figure out the message that you’re actually trying to convey, you can deliver the same message in a small percentage of that time in a more attractive and inciting manner.

What’s To Come

This article is part 1 of 5 tips to video marketing. Please leave feedback on what you think about these tips and what changes should/should not be made. Hope to here from you soon.