June 29, 2009
By Nico McLane Broadcast & Streaming Media Expert
Featured Articles

In Search of Video SEO That Works

Tom Wilde, CEO of EveryZing, a company that features speech-to-text, search, and optimization technologies, took the time to show us the "sauce" during a series of interviews and web conferences. He says, "EveryZing’s speech-to-text technology enables multimedia clips to be robustly indexed, increasing their ‘discoverability’ by the web search engines and boosting online advertising opportunities. EveryZing uses its technology to ensure that every piece of audio and video from each client’s web site is wrapped in a rich layer of metadata, including a full text output of the spoken word track, so it can be searched and accessed easily and precisely by consumers and, as a result, online advertisers can now place contextually relevant messages within and alongside multimedia content. This process makes all context referenced within the video searchable and clickable, to the exact point in the timeline where the ‘keywords’ are spoken."

In our real time "show me the sauce" demo with Wilde, he entered the keywords "unfreezing pipes" into Google, which displayed the result shown in Figure 3 (page 42).

Figure 3. Google results for "unfreezing pipes," showing how BobVila.com benefits from EveryZing’s SEO.

BobVila.com is optimized using the EveryZing process and appears first in this search, as expected. However, when I change the search term slightly to "how to unfreeze pipes," the results are a bit different (Figure 4, page 42). One could predict this result by simply watching how Google reports results in the drop-down search suggestions (Figures 5 and 6, page 43). This is just a quick, down-and-dirty illustration, but it provides you with an idea of one of the methods I use to predict how results will be returned by Google. Google Insight is the preferred method.

Figure 4. When you change the search term from "unfreezing pipes" to "how to unfreeze pipes," the results aren’t so impressive.

Figures 5 and 6. Google’s Suggest feature demonstrates that the term "unfreeze pipes" (left) has less competition than "how to unfreeze pipes" (right); in fact, Google doesn’t suggest "unfreezing pipes" as an option.

The keywords "unfreezing pipes" have less competition than "how to unfreeze pipes." The term "unfreezing pipes" does not result in any quick reference in the Google homepage drop-down menu.

There are more stealthy, SEO-savvy methods for keyword targeting, but in this example, comparing the terms referenced in the Google drop-down menus, you can quickly see how the EveryZing optimized page first came up with a set of keywords versus what I would most likely enter organically if I needed to find out how to unfreeze my pipes.

When you look at the Bob Vila website, you will notice its videos are nested in EveryZing’s MetaPlayer, and there are markers on the video timeline that let users jump to the exact moment on the timeline that the keyword they have searched for is spoken (Figure 7). The real power of MetaPlayer may not be as easily seen when searching on the big search engines, but once you are using the MetaPlayer, the related search is extremely robust and useful.

Figure 7. Videos on Bob Vila’s website are nested in the EveryZing MetaPlayer.

I did not have to install or download anything new when I went to this website.

On the right of the player, the entire transcript is available, and every single word is clickable and will show the time on the timeline that the word appears and jump to that point in the video.

This type of translation for online video is just evolving. Soon, fully mature products will be able to literally "extract" the meaning and tone of video clips, enabling them to be easily and specifically related to search results. This means content will be undeniably specific to the terms or phrases entered into the search field. Right now, I get a lot of "related content" from sites such as YouTube that really makes me scratch my head.

There are many tools that can be used to help users select keywords that result in good positioning for Google results such as Google Insights for Search (Figure 8).

Figure 8. A study of Google Insight for Search revealed that, as of the time this article was written, searches for the word video outpaced searches for the words sex, god, or Obama.