The Value of Video Optimization

The race to top the search results on Google has spawned an entire industry, but a vast majority of those optimizers have yet to take the value of video optimization for search seriously. In a recent blog post, “Help Videos Help You”, I discussed the advantage of posting relevant video content on your website and how it will help increase your search rankings with the appropriate keyword searches. Please don’t think this is a magic bullet straight to the top o Google’s rankings, but there is less competition and more elbow room for you to make an impression. Google’s “Universal Search” feature, which incorporates results from not only news sites, but videos and maps, was introduced in May 2007 and already yields one-fourth of its results return video, according to a study by Nate Elliot, now with Forrester Research.

Videos are 53 times more likely to appear on the first page of Google’s search results than text pages. The reason for this is that there are far fewer videos than web pages, of course. However, keep in mind that U.S. video views have surpasses searches. In November of 2008, there were 12.7 billion video views and 12.3 billion searches. There are already multiple video SEO companies with services ranging from video production to creation of keyword-driven video pages based on natural language processing and content analysis. In a PermissionTV survey of more than 400 executives, 67% said online video would be a primary focus of their 200 online marketing.

If you are also going to start a video element into your online marketing campaign for 2009, it is recommended that you optimize keywords by including them in the titles, tags, and file names. Be sure to host them on YouTube and make sure to add new content along with it. Just like with milk, freshness matters in SEO and Video SEO. I do want to caution that video is not a cure-all for your SEO woes. Video production takes time and money. Watching videos also take time to watch, which may take away from the time that potential consumer could be converting. Video optimization is most appropriate for visual industries and branding efforts, not direct response. If your company is not very good at text-based SEO, then your company is going to have trouble with video SEO. However, if done correctly and efficiently, Video Optimization can be a very valuable marketing tool. Original branded video content, viral commercials, video analytics and video search are becoming more valuable online as video search becomes a more prominent activity of the internet.

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