SES: Pumping Up Video Search Optimization

By David A. Utter - Tue, 04/10/2007 - 10:51am.

Making video more visible means working on its appeal to video search engines. A morning panel at SES New York discussed Video Search Optimization. Attendees headed to the Search Engine Strategies conference in New York under a mostly clear sky today. A session on video search and optimizing for the engines that index it awaited those hitting the Multimedia and Mobile Track at a running start.

SES: Pumping Up Video Search Optimization

Eric Papczun, Director of Natural Search, Performics, spoke about what he was seeing new in the world of video search. "These include file tagging which I refer to as 'scene tagging'. These are often user generated tags. This allows viewers to just watch the parts of a video that pertain to you."

One insight Eric gave involved the actual keyword, 'video'; he believes there is still a good opportunity to brand a site to it as a keyword. "If you have a good position with the word 'video' with search engines, you are going to do well down the road."

Don't neglect paid search, either. Eric said search marketing can help you "capture complete and comprehensive real estate" when trying to reach online eyeballs. In the United States, some 123 million people watch video online; more than a quarter of them watch something at least once a week.

Google Video gathers most of that traffic, snaring about 68 percent of the relative share of viewers. YouTube's popularity has continued to grow, even as major media companies like Viacom challenge the video sharing site over its practices.

There are other roadblocks to video that have to be overcome, as we are still in the early stages of its adoption. Taxonomies vary from producer to producer, as there is no consistent, simple list of terms to use for labeling content.

Finding video with conventional search depends on text from the video's corresponding web page. Eric said links and anchor text are "still king" when it comes to Google's video search.

Unattractive, SEO-unfriendly URLs can also hinder the indexing of videos. Just as many bloggers have been moving toward URL rewriting to make their posts more easily indexed by search engines, videos should benefit from a similar optimization approach.

Video Search Optimization
Sherwood says we’re here to look at online video and its impact on search. Lots of people are looking into and playing with it. Marketers are looking at as a new a channel they can dive into. Video is not only an opportunity; it’s also a responsibility now that video is showing up in the SERPs.

Sherwood presents just one slide of statistics and tells us that us that according to Hitwise, in July 2007, YouTube’s market share exceeded the other 64 video portal sites combined. No wonder Google bought them.

Video is a compelling search engine optimization channel. Video in 2007 is still mostly an entertainment play. Social/viral can transfer value to your search engine optimization efforts through video:

• Digg, etc >> blogs >> thousands of links.
• Those links result in a sugar rush of traffic.
• But those links also contribute to your site’s rankings – and that pus you in front of your target audience.

Thanks to viral, a video Web page can outperform a conventional Webpage in standard search results.

Sherwood presents a series of video strategies for different industries and applications.

Video for Content Providers: From bloggers to television networks, video can be used to bring visitors to your site. Teaser strategy: Upload a few select videos to portals like YouTube; provide links back to related videos on your site.

The goal is to get them back to your Web site to view ads and explore your other content. Video search engine optimization is a key element in establishing “video.yoursite.com” and viral-driven linking helps that. And remember, videos now appear in Google’s Universal Search. Video search engine optimization is now mainstream search engine optimization.

Video for Pharmaceutical Companies: Yes, it’s less fun, but it’s not totally uninteresting (or at least it doesn’t have to be). It’s kind of like the stuff you watch on the Discovery Channel (ooo, low blow!). On-site strategy doesn’t have to dovetail with portal strategy. You can do interviews with patients to make the drugs seem more real and more trustworthy. You can do videos on newsworthy topics like AIDS, flu, outbreaks, fad diets, etc.

Video for E-Commerce: Follow the buzz and promote your hottest products. Showcase anticipated uses – demo high-tech products, build a deck if you sell high power tools, show test drives for cars. Sherwood talks about the infamous iPhone Will It Blend video.

Video for Consumer Packaged Goods: Who wants to see a video about laundry detergent? He doesn’t know either, but some products can create tremendous buzz. Be choosey and get creative. He says so far when videos get famous it’s been by accident – videos like the Diet Coke/Mentos videos. Videos with millions of views start to rival your TV advertising.

Popular videos become a positive and permanent addition to brand equity. The Mentos commercial is still ranking number one in the search engines for its keywords.

As noted above, most of today’s video search “success stories” are happy accidents. Be imaginative and find ways to demonstrate the value of your products in an entertaining way.

Sherwood ends by telling the audience to add him on LinkedIn. Nice.

Next up is Jeremy Clem.

There is a huge opportunity in video. Seventy-five percent of US internet users watched an average of 158 minutes in May. They viewed more than 8.3 billion video streams, 72 percent watched news online and 76 percent helped drive The Viral Chain.

Video consumption is no longer isolated to TV. It now includes video sites and search. Video is on the rise.

Users are watching videos on YouTube (49 percent), MySpace (12 percent), and Google Video (5 percent). But they’re not going directly to the sites to do it. They’re finding them through the engines.

The roadblocks to video are that search is still very dependant on the text from video’s corresponding Web page. There’s a lack of simple and consistent taxonomy for site producers to use. Video technology is unfriendly to search engine crawlers.

Think like the video searcher. When you’re optimizing your video, use the terms users are likely to be searching for. He talks about the Michael Richards and David Hasseloff videos.

If you want videos to rank you have to surround them with HTML. CNBC.com does a nice job of surrounding videos with text content. Include social bookmarking tools that facilitate easier distribution.

Make it easy for crawlers to find your video content by putting your video directly right off your root. Create a video site map with the H1 tag reading “video site map”. Repeat news and video keywords. Provide RSS feeds. Link in the global header. Put a video search on your site. Use primary keywords in text links.

Tag your video files with relevant scenes. Split up your video into multiple scenes and tag those individually. Do you want to site through a 10 minute debate video or do you want to just listen to the question you’re interested in? Probably the latter.
Make video embeddable and imprint your brand logo. It creates brand awareness and visibility. Search marketers should target generic video search terms like “news video” to build online awareness.

Best Practices for video optimization

• Train editors to think like video searchers
• Encode for the ride keywords
• Use keywords in filename
• One video per URL
• Add tagging
• Keep video files in one directly
• Surround video with on page relevant text
• Crosslink to videos using keywords in anchor text
• Create an optimized video site map
• Upload videos to search engines
• Add informative Meta data
• Allow video files to be embedded and include a logo

Gregory Markel is next at bat.

Gregory is super excited about his presentation because he’s going to show us everything. He starts off by showing us a number of stats but flips through so fast that I can’t write them down. I think there was a 7 somewhere. Maybe it was a 70?

Ooh, I got one: 8 percent of males and 66 percent of females watch online video. Video search is influencing regular search results due to Google Universal Search. [8 percent, really? Are you sure you're not missing a 0? --Susan]

Three basic approaches to video optimization types

• Video Files Metadata Optimization: Talking the source video file and infusing it with your keyword triggers in the Title, Description, and Keywords tags. Make sure your content is feature on its own page with relevant surrounding text and properly embedded link elements.
• Upload Optimization: Most popular. These type of video search engines required that your upload your video search files. Add a social flair by getting your “friends” to submit or vote for you on the social media sites.
• RSS Optimization: Submit your video to RSS.

[Gregory talks too fast.]
There’s a startup company called tubemogul.com that is FREE and has put together the first standardized upload system. They’re currently uploading to 9 video search engines and is really a one-stop universal upload shop. They are reporting views, which engines are most popular, comments, and ratings.
Some Tips: Again, keyword-infuse and target all of your video metadata. And also, know that some video search engines are beginning to use search recognition and optical character recognition, therefore, make sure your audio files is targeted and audible!

Okay, Gregory is done. Thank goodness. Someone take away his coffee.

Stephen Baker is up next.

Core online media problem: Search engines have historically had very little to work with in terms of properly discovering and indexing multimedia content.

Audience Reach: Transcripts yields crawler friendly content rich pages. Metadata analysis provides a broader spectrum of relevant terms for optimization. Content behind inbound links and anchor text in more visible to crawlers. Site level optimization is improved with more opportunities for outbound links.

Content Access: EveryZing indexes the full content of Fox Sports Multimedia files and as a result is able to significantly increase the number of keyword results. Greater discovery lends to increased consumption and enhanced monetization opportunities.

From a consumer standpoint, automatic extraction of key terms and concepts for tagging, categorization.

Video Search optimization
If you perform a simple search on video search optimization, you will be bombarded with numerous articles. Video search optimization 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 have a successful stint in video search optimization, you should have knowledge of some key technical aspects involving online video and 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. Once you are through with this, next step is to look across the top video search platforms having the highest performances in overall views, ratings, and latency. The only way to measure your success is to view count. You have to keep a track of the section of audience already searching for your targeted terms. In case you fail to find the same, find the closest related terms being searched. In video search engine optimization user feedback plays a very vital role.

It has been seen 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 your video is popular in the video SERPs, you get the opportunity to submit fresh content. Many websites make a common mistake by providing the same content again and again. Don’t make your video content to simply repeat what’s already out there, instead, finding a fresh “content space” for your target keyword term. 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. You can even put the actual branding inside the video, such as backlinks or domain name or specific URL as a graphic in the video. So if you wish to succeed in search engine optimization’s mad frenzy race, video search engine optimization is the best for you.