"Video SEO"... Using Online Videos to Generate Traffic for Your Website

Here's what ComScore said about Online Video in July 2009...

• Over 81.0 percent of the U.S. Internet audience viewed online video.

• The average online video viewer watched 500 minutes (or 8.3 hours) of video

• 120.3 million viewers watched 8.9 billion videos on YouTube.com (74.1 videos per viewer).

• 48.2 million viewers watched 518.6 million videos on MySpace.com (10.8 videos per viewer).

• The average Hulu viewer watched 12.0 videos, totaling 1 hour and 13 minutes of videos per viewer.

• The duration of the average online video was 3.7 minutes.

Video SEO Techniques

Host your video with your own player using a 3rd party service with an edge network delivery service. Edge networks are setup to eliminate lag and latency for your end customer viewing the video. According to the panel, YouTube is a great free service but the lack of control of the player and the fact that the video really isn't on your website is a negative.

Tag your videos. I learned that tagging covers a lot of areas. You need to tag your website so that you can track video views (more of an analytics issue). More importantly, the video themselves can be tagged with your own descriptive data. This allows people to more quickly skip ahead to the content that they want to view. Search engines can also uses these tags to better index your content.

Include a transcript of the video inline below the video to get the text SEO benefit of the content.

Use YouTube in addition to your own viewer. Google still seems to heavily weight its video results to content on YouTube. Do not, however, post the same video on Google as the video you host on your site. Use the YouTube video as a teaser that points your viewers to your website. The benefit is that you are getting unique video content on your site as well as content on YouTube.

Create a Video Sitemap and reference it in your robots.txt file.

Here's an example of the code for a video sitemap as shown on Google's Webmaster Tools page.

Research & select the right keywords that your customers would use to search for your site or business.

Promote your video to the right audience (who is your ideal client & how do they search)

A Useful Video Tip

The visitors who land on your site and decide to watch your video may not be as interested in your topic as you. Most viewers tend to watch only the first 10 to 15 seconds of a video. By the time the average video makes it to the 1 minute mark, 54% of the viewers have tuned out.

That indicates that you must have a call to action near the beginning of the video as well as at the end. Don't force the user skip ahead to find your contact information - this info should show throughout your video (e.g. on a footer band) to make it easy for potential customers to contact you at any stage of the presentation...

To summarize... If the average video is 3.7 minutes long and the only call to action was at the end of the video, 83.38% of the viewers would have dropped off before viewing the call to action. Place calls to action throughout the video and keep the video at around 60 seconds or less to optimize the effectiveness of your online video.

Salient Stats for Online Video

45.13% of all Direct video views come from direct navigation like a Google or YouTube Search.

81% of all "Referred" video views come from various long tail links like blogs.

Are They Getting The Message?

How to Find Good Keywords:

• Look at your website

• Ask your employees & happy customers how they search

• Look at your competitors on YouTube

• Use the Keyword Selector Tool from Google

Video SEO Tips for YouTube

• Research your competition at YouTube for related keywords, tags & descriptions.

• Check the links going into your competitors YouTube video page

• Use YouTube's Keyword Suggestions and Google's Keyword Selector Tool

• Determine your most important keywords and pay attention to your character limits: Title - 120, Keyword Tags - 120, Description - 1000

• Lead with your most relevant keyword (Use Keyword Prominence)

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Example of Code for Video Sitemaps in XML

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