Please welcome Brandon back for the last installment of his Social SEO and you series (post 1 and post 2 and post 3) - it’s been super information and I’ve learned a lot. Please leave any questions you might have in the comments, I know he’d love to answer them, and follow him on Twitter - he’s a great guy!
Brandon is a consultant, business marketing grad, strategist, house music junkie, avid reader, speaker, and coffee fiend. He likes to make and break stuff, currently working in the Light Apps division at Corel and the CEO of his own start-up Incentify.
You can find him @BrandonWaselnuk
Video tagging is a very complicated space right now. With the advent of Apple’s iPhone 4S and Siri there’s been a lot of conversation around schema tags. (Yea they just like to come up with fun new words) I’m going to do my best to hit the high level topics you’ll actually care about and be able to implement right now. For more details (like the Technical Considerations section) you can download the slide deck or ask me any questions in the comments/email/call/carrier pigeon?
How do videos get more SEO?
Here are some quick and easy ways to make discovering your video a bit more likely:
- Make tags relevant and use a lot. When it comes to tags it’s always bad news if you use fake tags, in fact it usually makes search engines index you with a ‘nofollow’ meaning; no search. So don’t go saying it’s a Justin Bieber video unless it is k?
- Try to use consistent tagging across all videos, this helps aggregators. Also; using adjectives in those tags is a good idea
- Match your titles and descriptions to tags
- Don’t use natural language in tags (don’t waste space on words like ‘such, and, or, to’)
SEO on YouTube
A huge number of people stick to YouTube, ain’t nothing wrong with that! So here are some tips and tricks when you’re dealing with this huge player in the video space:
- Use this Keyword Research tool as the first step in finding relevant tags for your video. (Yes, Justin Bieber was searched 13,516,800 times this month)
- As discussed above, Tags are the only way for search engines (other than special ones like Blinkx) to find your video. Also; consider dropping the URL to your homepage in the description so you can get some backlinks
- Use the ability to set the thumbnail image of your video, make it something compelling so users want to click your video. A picture is worth… screw it sex sells, just look at Ray William Johnson; his stills are always some celebrity looking scandalous or something
- Allow comments, haters gonna hate so just let it go
- Embed your video on your website to help transfer traffic and views
- Share over social media channels! (Obvious right? Sorry…:) )
Places to host your Video
Amateur Sites to use:
- YouTube
- Google Video
- MySpace Video
- Yahoo! Video
- AOL Video
- DailyMotion
- MetaCafe
- Revver
- Giant cheat sheet here (Please note, though extensive this page was written in 2007 some services may no longer exist, I’ve just never found a better list with links and criteria)
Submission to Video Searching sites:
- AOL Video http://video.aol.com/
- Or you can use a Media RSS (MRSS) feed to submit content hosted elsewhere (This Media RSS feed would exist on your webpage, so it would drive traffic back to your website)
- Blinkx – Use this form to ask for submission to the database
- Yahoo! – Use this form for submission
It’s been a Pleasure
This brings to a close my guest blog series for the wonderful Lara Wellman. I hope you got some great information and took something useful away rather than just wasted like 3 minutes of your life. I know I had fun writing these articles, I always have more fun carrying on conversations so come see me on twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or in the comments.
