All have heard about the online video phenomenon that is hitting the internet. Viewers by the millions are going online to upload and watch online video content each day. Often, videos are a more effective way to convey an advertiser’s message than typical offline advertising. And because video is becoming so mainstream, the cost to create online video content is extremely low and affordable for almost anyone. Online video has seen massive improvements in the past 2 years with regard to broadband connectivity, streaming, etc… Keeping in mind the vast popularity of online video as a method of internet marketing, it is important to learn the techniques most effective for optimizing your video for search engines.

1) In order to have your video more easily discovered, one very popular technique is to submit a text transcript along with your video for users and for the search engines to understand and index your video more easily. Use a keyword rich title for the transcript and be sure to include an introduction or summary that describes the video content in text form.

2) Keep in mind that when users search for videos on search engines, often time they use the word “video” in their search. For example, “car racing video.” Therefore, in addition to the keywords that you are targeting, also be sure to include the word “video” or “videos” in your description, text, title, meta data, etc…

3) Search engine crawlers rely a lot on the link texts to figure out what the video is all about as they are not capable to figure out the contents of the video otherwise. Therefore it is advisable to get as many back links as possible for your video.

4) Create a video sitemap exclusively for your online video content so that engines can find all of your videos and understand the structure of your site more easily. This helps the web crawlers to locate your video files speedily and effortlessly.

5) When hosting video content on your own, keep in mind that flash is next to impossible for search engines to read and understand. Try to work with a format that is not flash. However, the simplest way to enable video on your site is via the popular flash players. That being said, do your best to take advantage of the other tips for SEO so that search engines can easily understand what it is your video is about.

6) Create search engine friendly keyword URLs for your video pages. To do this, you can use mod-rewrite function or htaccess file so that the URLs are freely assessable and readable by the search engines.

7) More than anything, I have learned that the thumbnail that you choose for your video is one of the most important factors in terms of the number of people that choose to view your video. With that in mind, try to experiment with various thumbnails until you have a good idea which images attract the most views from the audience that you are targeting.
If you are hosting videos on your own site, use the sitemap that we mentioned earlier and keep your videos all in the same directory folder so that search engines can more easily locate all the videos you are publishing.

In addition to the specific optimization techniques listed above, make sure that you also follow some common guidelines for online video content:

9) With any SEO that you do online, choose keywords that you know users are searching for. Use keyword research tools to discover keywords and phrases that are most often searched for when looking for the information that you are creating.

10) Enable ratings, reviews, comments, and feedback on your videos. Research shows that allowing users to provide feedback results in greater views for your video in addition to the fact that users who provide feedback tend to be those users that act.

These tips were provided by Mark Robertson of ReelSEO. ReelSEO is focused on Video Search Optimization and Internet Video Marketing. For more tips on video SEO visit ReelSEO.

According to the latest research, not only is online video the fastest growing media online, but is has now surpassed search as the most popular activity online. Online video views surpassed searches performed on the top 5 search engines, according to stats released by comScore and covered by ReelSEO in October 2008.

For internet marketers, online video is a buzz topic right now and the reason is that it is one of the most effective ways to convey your marketing message and brand. However, because online video marketing is such a new phenomena, there are many aspects that are not well understood. Content producers and marketers are clamoring to produce videos for online use, but many do not understand what it takes to get traffic to their videos. The first step in gaining exposure for your online video content is in making certain that it is discoverable. That is where Video search engine optimization, also known as Video SEO comes in.

In order to leverage the power of online video with search, one must first answer the question, “what is video SEO, or video search engine optimization?” Simply stated, it is the art and process of creating online video content in such a way that it is easily discovered and indexed by search engines. Doing this will help to drive maximum exposure to your video content. When we talk about video SEO, there are really 2 separate and distinct strategies for optimizing video online.

First, there is what is known as “Posted” video SEO. With “posted” video optimization, the strategy is to get as many views to your video content as possible. To do this, you can take advantage of the massive audience that video sharing websites like YouTube, metacafe, blip.tv and others have. One other benefit to this strategy is that you can leverage the existing authority and page rank that these sites have in order to show up in Universal search on the major search engines.

When optimizing video for “Posted” video SEO, it is crucial that you pay close attention to the keywords that you choose to include in the upload fields like tags, descriptions, titles, etc… It is also recommended that you utilize many of the tools and services available that allow you to automatically upload your video content to many video sharing websites at once. The main downfall with “posted” video SEO is that it is more difficult to get users back to your own website property.

In addition to “Posted” video search optimization, there are many techniques and strategies for “hosted” video SEO, or “website” video SEO. With this, the goal is to optimize video content that is placed on your own website. With universal search on the rise, it is possible to utilize video content to increase your own website’s chances of ranking in the major search engines as well as the video search engines. The main benefit in this strategy is that you can expose potential viewers to your other business assets, products and services.

For “hosted” video SEO strategy, it is most crucial that you consider it a holistic approach to website optimization and follow general best practices for optimizing website content. That being said, because search engines can not yet understand the content within a video, it is most important that you optimize your pages utilizing on-page text that is relevant to your video content. There are many tips and techniques for “hosted” video SEO. The following tips are crucial:

1) When including video on a web page, make certain that you populate the page with relevant on-page text.

2) Leverage the use of transcripts, descriptions, related links, meta tags, URL-structure, etc…

3) Publish all your videos within the same directory or subdomain and keep each video on its own unique URL.

4) Publish a video sitemap or MRSS feed to help guide the search engines to your video content.

5) Be sure to generate off-site links to your video pages by encouraging users to share and link to your videos.

Whatever strategy you utilize for optimizing your video content, ReelSEO has a ton of expert tips, guidelines, tutorials, and information for both “posted” and “hosted” video SEO. In addition, ReelSEO is the only website out there today that is 100% focused on video search engine optimization and online video marketing. If you want to learn about online video marketing, ReelSEO is the most authoritative source out there.

Good luck and happy optimization. Get on board with Video SEO today.

Before you dive further into online video, be sure to check out the web video marketing experts at ReelSEO, the online video marketer’s guide. Learn more about video marketing, video SEO, video advertising, and general best practices for online video publishing and marketing.

I bet you watched a video online today, and so did i. As the speed and quality of online video has increased so have the number and variety of video websites around. You can latch onto the power of this and make a significant boost to your traffic.

As a business owner, you need to start thinking of incorporating video into your sites or you may be left behind. Incorporating video is becoming more important to internet marketing than ever.

Recording video is very easy to do. Using just a mobile phone, camcorder, flipcam or many other devices to record video promoting your company or services. Then upload it to your Youtube.com account and embed the video into your website. Just by doing this will get extra traffic from views of your video when they show up in the search engine results. Sometimes on the first page of Google.

Video sharing sites are massively popular and youTube itself is one of the largest search engines used by the public. Attracting millions of viewers daily. The site is getting bigger than many standard search engines. As trends change, people are now searching for videos on their subject of choice.

Once your video is created and uploaded, you can then duplicate the process by putting your video on other big video search engines. This will leverage the effect of that single video tenfold and it will get many more views across the video sites which will all link to your business product or service.

Here is where you get to be creative. Put slideshows in your video or maybe you talking to camers. You can even record what is happenning on your PC screen and use that. Make it short 30 seconds to a minute for that dynamic effect.

Join the many other succesful websites that currently get a big chunk of traffic by using video in their marketing campaigns. Video looks great and works great.

You’ve put time, energy and money into creating your videos and you’ve got them up on the web. Now you’re waiting for people to suddenly find them and watch them right? Well you’ve got a bit more work ahead of your in order to do that. You can’t just sit back and wait for people to find your video content. You’ve got to get your videos in front of the video search engines and the spiders so that they can be indexed. So here are some quick ways for you to help get your videos in front of viewers.w

Keywords “These most precious and important of things are necessary or all content. But not only necessary they must be accurate in order to be useful. If they’re not then you won’t get the traffic that you want or the search engines will not list your content as high as you’d like. So be very picky when you set forth your keywords for your video. Once you have them chosen then it’s time to implement them. Make sure you use them in all the appropriate fields and definitely be sure to have them in the title of your video as well as the description.

Video Sharing Sites “You will not be surprised to learn that YouTube gets more traffic than your website does. So why not put your video where the most people can find it? YouTube is one of the most popular sites on the web and one of the great things about it is that you won’t get hit for duplicate content in Google’s index when you post your videos up there. A pretty cool advantage for a small amount of work really. Making a channel to group all of your videos together will also help to strengthen brand awareness as they will be easier to find.

RSS and MRSS “These two protocols allow you to tell the search engines when your site updates and when you post something new on the web, specifically for MRSS a media file. There are very specific formats required for these files but they’re easy enough to research. Many CMS software packages even make them automatically so you don’t even really need to worry about making it, just submitting it. This will really help the search engines find you content when you tell them where these files are and soon your videos will be shooting up the search engine results charts.

While these are only three simple ways to get your video search engine optimized they are definitely a start. Making your video easy to find, easy to share and appropriately categorized will definitely be a major help in getting people to look at it. But it’s also got to be worth looking at so the content has to be useful and interesting. There are many other things that you can do to search engine optimize your video online so be sure to take a look around.

We all know how popular search is for internet users. However, did you know that as of October 2008, video surpassed search on the major 5 search engines in terms of becoming the most popular online activity? According to research covered on ReelSEO, online video is now the most popular online activity worldwide.

Online video, combined with search, is one of the most effective ways to drive internet users to your videos and market your products and services. However, being that online video marketing is such a new strategy, there are still many aspects of video marketing that are not well understood. For online marketers and video content producers, it is important to learn and practice techniques that increase the likelihood that internet users will discover their content via the major search engines. To do this, one must understand video search optimization, also known as video SEO.

Let’s start off by answering the question, what exactly is Video SEO? Simply put, Video SEO, also known as video search engine optimization is the art and process of publishing a video such that it is easily discovered and attracts as much traffic as possible for your target audience. When we talk about video SEO, there are really 2 different strategies for getting your videos discoverable on the search engines.

One strategy for video SEO is that which we call “Posted” video SEO. Essentially, this is when you optimize video content that is uploaded to video websites like Youtube and Yahoo. With “Posted” video SEO, the strategy is to generate as many views as possible for your videos. Uploading your video to these sites allows you to draw upon the massive audience of viewers that these sites already have. In addition, because these websites have a pre-existing authority and page rank with the search engines, this is an effective strategy to leverage these sites to obtain rankings within organic and universal search.

When optimizing your video for uploading (”posted” video SEO), it is very important that you choose your target keywords wisely and include these in your titles, descriptions, tags, comments, etc… There are also many services available on the web that allow you to upload your videos to multiple video sharing websites at once. Although there are a few tactics that can help, for the most part, a “posted” strategy does not assist well with driving traffic back to your own website.

In addition to “Posted” video search optimization, there are many techniques and strategies for “hosted” video SEO, or “website” video SEO. With this, the goal is to optimize video content that is placed on your own website. With universal search on the rise, it is possible to utilize video content to increase your own website’s chances of ranking in the major search engines as well as the video search engines. The main benefit in this strategy is that you can expose potential viewers to your other business assets, products and services.

With “hosted” video SEO, it is most important that you follow best practices in general for search engine optimization. Because search engines can not yet read within video content, it is important that you optimize the HTML pages that contain your video content much in the same way that you would with regular SEO. Although there are many detailed tips and techniques for “hosted” video SEO, most can be summed up with the following tips:

1) Make sure that the page with your video on it includes a good amount of relevant on-page text to guide the search engines. Include your keywords in your meta tags, URL string, descriptions, etc…

2) Leverage the use of transcripts, descriptions, related links, meta tags, URL-structure, etc…

3) Keep your videos in one main directory with one video per unique URL.

4) Create and submit a video sitemap to guide the search engines to your video content.

5) Let users share and link to your video in order to increase the off-page linking to your video pages.

Whether your strategy is to drive visits to your video or to your website in general, video SEO is an effective way to leverage the power of online video. If you are interested in learning more advanced tips and techniques for either “posted” or “hosted” video content, ReelSEO is the website to visit. They are the only site completely focused on providing resources and information for Video SEO.

Take advantage of online video marketing and video SEO. Good luck to you and your efforts.

You know youve done it. Youre part of the YouTube generation and youve not only watched videos but uploaded them as well. Once you did that though you realized the quality of your video just sucked. You tried a variety of things and still arent happy with the quality.

There are several variables that you yourself can control prior to uploading the video to the service. Of these the most important are outlined below.

Resolution ” Taking a video at a resolution too small for YouTube means that when it goes into the service it will need to be stretched. This is a surefire way to lose most if not all of the quality of a video and even may make it unwatchable. Your best bet for a safe resolution is the recommended YouTube size of 1280×720, also known as 720. Now youre all gasping because you can get HD quality. It will make for a large file but YouTube can handle up to 1GB files as long as theyre not more than 10 minutes (actually 10:59).

Bitrate ” Youre asking what the heck that is right? Well simply its now much information your video will contain per period of time. Normally this comes up in Kilobits or Megabits per second. Obviously in this regard the higher the better. However if you go too high the video files will far exceed the limitations of YouTube so you need to learn balance Grasshopper. In this case you still want a high number but you dont want it to be sky high. Somewhere around 6Mbps to 8Mbps is a good range. Then when the video gets to the YouTube compactor itll have enough data to retain quality. YouTube can handle up to 1GB of file but only 10 minutes so pay attention to that also.

While youre thinking about the other things youve also got to think about several more things, audio is one of them. You need to have this in MP3 or AAC (44.1KHz Stereo ideally) on the track or you risk losing quality during compression and conversion. Your best bet is to set this to CBR of VBR if you have the option. Framerate is another thing you should pay attention to. To keep thinks flowing smoothly youve got to maintain a minimum of 30+ FPS or frames per second. The file format you need to have your stuff in is .mov or .mp4. If your video editing package cant handle that then youre going to want to look into one that can. Quicktime Pro is often touted as the ideal since its both cheap and handles a wide variety of video formats.

Take all of this into account and youre on your way to some better looking YouTube videos in the near future. Now get out there and get to work!

As you may have noticed, there is a ton of buzz out there about video search and marketing for video search engines, and there are a few posts out there with good information on how to upload your videos to these search engines, but most do not provide insight into the specific needs of SEO for video.

To have a success in video search engine optimization, you should have knowledge of some key technical aspects involving online video and search.

Keyword research is important for Video search engine optimization. However, there are some key differences in terms of the methods that should be employed for keyword researching video terms. In order to know your target audience for seeing your videos, it is important to first conduct some research on keywords and compile a keyword list. This list can be obtained by doing some simple searches for a related product or service. There are not yet any keyword research tools specifically for video. Keep in mind that video searches at this point tend to be shorter keywords, not “long tail” searches. In addition, more than anything, your keyword list should have the word “video” in it. Examples - car videos, car video, racing video, automotive videos, etc….

So, after you have completed your keyword research, I would also suggest that you take an inventory of the various video search websites. In other words, take note of which sites have the highest traffic, which channels and categories are the most popular, etc… You will likely want to submit your video to as many sites as you can but it will certainly be important to get your video on the more popular search engines as well.

Well, as you know with keyword research, it is an ongoing process. It is important to pay attention to the feedback, comments, and links to existing related videos to find related keyword terms that you may have missed in your original keyword list.

You will want to encourage readers to submit feedback as studies show that users who provide feedback tend to be more active and easier to convert. In other words, those users that provide feedback, typically are more likely to call, email, visit your site, etc…

It is much easier to get your video optimized and seen on search engine results pages when you are choosing a theme that does not already exist in mass. Dont make the mistake of creating videos that repeat videos already out there. Instead, choose fresh ideas and find a “content space” for your theme/keyword.

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.

With video SEO, it is also important to take advantage of the ability to brand your video using watermarks, logos, text, or any additional information that will get users back to your main destination. That is the beauty of video search engine optimization. It does and will drive traffic back to your website or business.

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.