In Search of Video SEO That Works
Google Insights reports that over the last 30 days (as of January 2009, when this article was written), searches with the keyword video outnumbered keywords searches for sex, god, and Obama. So what do the numbers on the graph mean? According to Google, "The numbers on the graph reflect how many searches have been done for a particular term, relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time. They don’t represent absolute search volume numbers, because the data is normalized and presented on a scale from 0–100; each point on the graph is divided by the highest point, or 100. The numbers next to the search terms above the graph are summaries, or totals."
In practice, simply adding the word "video" to a site makes it more likely to come up in a search, but there are also 3.38 billion other results for video on Google, so the competition is tight. The trick is to find the magic combination of keywords that eliminate the competition and push results for your content to the top of the list. You must take the same route one would take to Carnegie Hall, "Practice, practice, practice."
When asked, "What makes for good VSEO?" Wilde points back toward the fundamentals of old-school SEO: "Optimize the video’s presentation page using standard SEO techniques; this is also true for videos uploaded to sharing sites. Logical file naming schemes, site structure, use sitemaps and relevant keyword usage throughout the landing page will result in good VSEO."
We have already looked at how to target keywords and predict whether they will work to return results, but to measure ROI on video, deeper metrics on views and demographics need to be measured. Google makes it simple to come up with these metrics; in March 2008, the company launched YouTube Insight for videos.
If you upload a video to YouTube, you will see how often it is viewed in different geographic regions as well as how popular it is relative to all videos in its market over a given period of time. You can also delve deeper into the life cycle of a video, determining how long it takes for it to become popular and what happens to video views as popularity peaks (Figure 9). YouTube is also rolling out paid search, a new feature that enables video distributors to buy keywords in YouTube on a pay-per-click basis. Currently, this is only available to agencies.
Figure 9. YouTube is rolling out paid search, a new feature that enables video distributors to buy keywords in YouTube on a pay-per-click basis. Currently, this is only available to agencies.
It’s faster to get a video indexed when uploaded to YouTube or another existing site that is already indexed by Google and the other major search engines. When a site is submitted manually, it takes at least 90 days to begin showing up in search results, but YouTube, MySpace, and other established sites can list the same video in less than 24 hours. Just make sure you don’t rely solely on an upload of your video, but create a full "channel page" for your videos, as those weigh more in Google and other search engines. Make sure that you clearly indicate the link back to the site you want end users to go to, include links in the channel pages, and include a lower-third graphic in the video itself with a title advertising your site.
How to Feed Your Late-Night VSEO Cravings With Feeds
Users can easily add a video site map to Google in order to optimize videos on their own sites for proper indexing. Two-way RSS feeds are also becoming much more dynamic. Even Google Video search is experimenting with outgoing RSS feeds and observing how video results are extracted and repurposed. For example, look at the RSS result for "streaming media" from Google Video (Figure 10, page 47).
Figure 10. Google Video RSS. Simply do a search on Google Video (video.google.com) and then add the following tag: ?&output=rss.
Simply do a search on Google Video (video.google.com) and then add the following tag: ?&output=rss.
Here is the URL for the Google Video homepage with the RSS feed tag added to the end: http://video.google.com/?&output=rss.
To search the feed for "streaming media" results, take the following URL: http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=streaming+media&emb =0&aq=f#.
Then place the RSS tag at the end of the URL, like so: http://video. google.com/videosearch?q=streaming+media&emb=?&output=rss.
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