In Search of Video SEO That Works
Going back to Truveo, it is an international portal and all the video content it indexes can be easily and freely syndicated via an API that anyone with an AOL account (screen name) could generate a key for—you can then sign up for a Truveo "director" account and "share your feed" with Truveo. Content owners who wish for their videos to show up in Truveo video search may publish a Media RSS (MRSS) feed and submit it through the director account online interface.
Content Management and Search in the Enterprise
Enterprise organizations have been producing and streaming media internally for several years. Over time, media assets build up in the archive even though they retain their informational value. They should, therefore, be transitioned into a logical management system that can archive media content and related assets while saving time and resources in manual processes. It is more important than ever to use media portal applications and the power of VSEO to keep these assets discoverable and manageable.
The ability to organize and search multimedia-presentation assets is fundamental to the enterprise, where an organization could generate thousands of elearning sessions, critical earnings announcements, and related media of a historically relevant nature each year. In my former role at JPMorgan Chase & Co., it was a matter of ROI and cost-cutting on traditional communications, such as print or static data, and cost-avoidance on more expensive marketing and communications tools, such as operator-assisted calls through bridging services. The key to making something like that work efficiently is to have a managed platform for access to the content and security features to set permissions and relate relevant presentations and meetings to authorized users and interested parties.
I spoke with Mike Lorenz, CTO and co-founder of Accordent Technologies, Inc., and asked if VSEO applies to the enterprise and how other organizations are using it. Lorenz ran through a demo of Accordent’s MMS (Media Management System) and showed me how end users in the enterprise experience VSEO benefits by using the system to locate videos and other digital media assets on their internal enterprise networks.
Content is sucked up into the system, categorized, and assigned unique metadata descriptions. This includes related digital assets such as slides, downloadable PDFs, and podcasts. The MMS enables users to search based on metadata as well as chapters and time stamps for quick retrieval of data from a specific point in time.
The Accordent MMS reminded me of YouTube for the enterprise, in that the value is mostly evolving from the video data. However, I can see many other tangential applications, especially if the content is published with viral components that enable internal enterprise users to share their interests and promote internal content.
A system like this can be integrated with a VTC (video teleconference) environment, such as Tandberg’s content management system (CMS) to make all meetings within an enterprise VSEO-friendly and searchable. If an enterprise is managing its own internal meetings to begin with, this type of video archiving and retrieval system is a no-brainer. There are hundreds of reasons why this would provide a reasonable ROI, especially if the initial investment in VTC was already made. Archiving is just the next logical step, as enterprises might as well keep everything on record for future reference, especially in the current corporate environment.
The Final Taste Test
The strategy you end up using depends on the goals of your effort.
—If you just want visibility or brand awareness, post the video everywhere and make it free to download.
—If you are selling something, use Google and other platforms to target your audience and create a clear call to action.Of course, your best strategy is to go online and read more about VSEO or hire a professional to drive the effort for you. Grant Crowell, a regular featured writer for ReelSEO.com and founder of Grantastic Designs, wrote a series of tips to help us distinguish between VSEO pros and posers in a regular column titled "Grant’s Rants: Video SEO ‘Posers’ Piss Me Off!" Here are some of his suggestions.
—See what video work the site has online——not just on its own site, but on all video-sharing websites. (Is it promising that your video will show up in YouTube even though it has little YouTube content of its own?)
—Request the site’s search engine results. Is its video content showing up in Google’s blended results?
—Request conversion stats. What’s the traffic? Comments? Links?
—Request customer testimonials. Can they demonstrate any leads? ROI?
Success is measured by number of views, the length of users’ views, and whether they return to view again, click over to related content, or buy your product.
VSEO Best Practices
You can either use social sites or search engines to promote your video, or you can create your own portal—or you may be better off doing both.
—The best practice for YouTube VSEO is to use channel pages to take advantage of the searchability of YouTube content, as the site’s pages get better positioning because of its size. This is also true for MySpace, Facebook, and other large community sites that allow video to be uploaded to their pages, have a vast collection of pages, and are viral.
—Host your own video and syndicate that content to get the best metrics. If you aren’t an existing large site, such as FOX News, but want to launch online video efforts, why not start your own?
—Google Analytics is free and easy to use with any open source CMS, including WordPress, Drupal, or Joomla, all of which offer free plug-ins to upload video and track usage.Whatever you decide, you will need to do the following:
—Choose where to promote your video.
—Narrow down your audience by demographic.
—Select your keywords.
—Define the naming schema for best search performance.
—Include RSS feeds with relevant metadata.
—Produce amazing video content (or syndicate it from other sources such as Truveo or blinkx).
Here are some more VSEO best practices.
—Produce quality content relevant and sensitive to your audience. Take length into account, as 3—4 minutes can be too long in web time depending on the audience and the call to action.
—Have a clear call to action, make user behavior traceable with analytics, and make it compelling and viral.
—Offer your audio and video content in as many formats as possible.
—When possible offer a transcript and associate slides or other descriptive assets. Use an optimization platform, such as EveryZing, to automate and index content. This is best practice for usability and accessibility.
—Use appropriate keywords in the file name and a logical linking structure with names linking to videos and landing pages. Avoid common words, such as "a," "and," "is," and "the." Known technically as "stop words," these grammar bits are generally ignored by search engines.
—Use descriptive keywords in links, not "Click Here." The link text should be search-engine-friendly and, equally as important, user-friendly.
—Optimize the video’s presentation page using standard SEO techniques; use the same approach for videos uploaded to sharing sites. Review and update video or other multimedia file metadata prop
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