Creating and posting videos of your products, services, or company resources can give a huge boost to site traffic and establish your name and brand as an authority online.  With the industrial marketplace in particular, videos can demonstrate complex processes, the functionality of machinery, offer ‘how to’ demonstrations, and can be a resource for communicating with company employees and customers alike.

But what exactly is online video optimization?  In a nutshell, online video optimization is the art and science of making sure that your video content attracts as much traffic as possible.

Simple enough, right?  Of course!  To help you along, here are some benefits to creating optimized videos for web use and tips to ensure success when posting them on your website or a social media site.

You basically have two options for posting your videos online:  posted content and hosted content.

Posted content is video content that is posted to another website, such as a social media or sharing site (YouTube, WordPress, etc).  Hosted content is that which is hosted on your own website.

The benefits of posted content:

• Posted content resources such as YouTube or Google Video are a goldmine of existing traffic and users.  You don’t have to worry about finding viewers, as they are there in the millions.
• Posted videos have a better ability to rank higher in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) and achieve better placement in Universal Search results.
• You don’t need your own website to post videos on other websites.
• Last year, 87 million people searched for videos online, and 58% of those searches resulted in Universal Search results.  Posted content is king, in Universal Search!
• Posted content also has the ability to ‘go viral’, acheiving a level of social or community status much higher than expected.

There are benefits to hosting your content on your own site, also:

• Your videos are under your full control.  You can tweak the metadata to be in line with related on-page text for full SEO benefits.
• You have control over the monetization and advertising associated with the video and your site.
• Increased site traffic is generated.
• Hosted content generates interest in your site and increases inbound links.

Once you’ve decided how you want to present your video online (posted, hosted or both), you next want to produce a video that is interesting, offers something new or useful and is accessible to the widest audience. 

Winning online videos have been proven to be: short (30 seconds to 3 mintues in length), interesting, often humorous or pithy, and low bandwidth to allow as many people as possible to download or view on a broad range or devices.  Also, if your video is a long one, break it into a series of viewable ‘pieces’.  You can also offer a very interesting ‘piece’ that suggests that the viewer visit your website to ‘view the full length video’. What a great way to bring more traffic to the site!  And making a video is actually very simple.  A simple PowerPoint presentation with narration can start you off, or you can use an online video production company to produce a high-end video for you.  The possibilities are endless!

You also want to use sound optimization tactics, especially if your video will be hosted on your own website.  You want to be especially careful of the potential impact on the SEO of your site if you are thinking of hosting your videos.  Take a good SEO approach to your hosted and posted videos and you won’t go wrong.

Here are some tips to ensure your videos are optimized for best performance in the search engines. 

For hosted videos:

• Videos on a webpage can block the proper optimization of text on the page, so you’ll want to make sure that if you embed a video on a page, that the site code stays clean and doesn’t garble up behind the scenes.
• Create a separate page and unique URL for each video, rather than having ten videos on one page.  This allows you to perform individualized SEO on each page and increases the amount of content you have available for search engines to crawl and index.  Also, ensure all video files are located in one folder, for consistency of URLs.
• Include relevant keywords and the word ‘video’ in the file name for stronger URLs.
• Add an abstract or at least a well-written caption for on-page content, with strong and relevant keywords included in the text. 
• NO POPUPS, PLEASE!  Embed the video in the webpage, to prevent visitors’ popup blockers from blocking your video. 
• Encode videos with good metadata: title, date, author, description and keywords.
• Offer videos in multiple formats (.mov, .mpeg, .avi) to ensure that your visitors can watch your video and aren’t redirected away to download a video player that they may not want. Chances are, once they are redirected from your site, they won’t come back.
• Include social bookmarking tools to allow viewers to share your videos with others.

For posted videos:

• Enable comments to allow viewers to offer opinions and respond to each other about your video.  Comments can be valuable, and you can always delete spam comments.
• Allow visitors to subscribe to your video channel.
• Also allow viewers to embed your video’s code in other places online. 
• Use Google XML sitemaps for videos for maximum indexing power. 
• Include a video ‘thumbnail’.  Currently, YouTube dominates the SERPs with results that include thumbnails and serve to draw the viewer’s eye down from the coveted top-left corner of the monitor (the top five search engine results, and paid ads).  Studies have shown that viewers will look at the text lower in the SERPs if thumbnails are included for videos.
• Submit your video content everywhere you can! Use syndication such as Media RSS (MRSS) to ‘feed’ you videos into as many sources as possible.

Good luck with your online video efforts!  If you have any other tips or suggestions for online video optimization, please let us know!
*Resources: Apogee Search: Online Video Optimization Webinar

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 3rd, 2009 at 4:49 pm and is filed under General, Social Media & Other Marketing Concepts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.