SES San Jose 2007 Multimedia Track: Video Search Optimization
Speakers: (Moderator) Sapna Satagopan, Associate Analyst, JupiterResearch Gregory Markel, Founder/President, Infuse Creative, LLC Jeremy Clem, DoubleClick/Performics Sherwood Stranieri, Search Marketing Director, Catalyst Online Stephen Baker, Chief Revenue Officer, Everyzing
Session Description: Producing video content? There are video search engines that specialize in gathering up your video and making it available to searchers seeking such cnotent. This session looks at how to make your video more visible in these specialized services.
Sherwood Stranieri: The Potential of Video Search Marketing
You can see here that the video sites are very strong, whether you measure them in just people who use them, streams, views, etc. YouTube's market share exceeds all the other video sites' shares combined. No wonder Google bought them.
Video is a compelling SEO channel. - Social media and viral marketing are the strength behind video SEO - Video in 2007 is still mostly an entertainment play. - Social/viral can transfer value to your SEO efforts through video: -- Digg, etc. >> blog >> thousands of links -- Those links result in a sugar rush of traffic (mostly untargeted, come and go traffic) -- But those links also contribute to your site's rankings - and that puts you in front of your target audience. - Thanks to viral, a video webpage can outperform a conventional webpage in standard search results.
Video for Content Providers - From bloggers to television networks - Teaser strategy: upload a few select videos to portals like YouTube: provide links back to related videos on your site. - The goal is to get them back to your site to view ads and explore your other content - Video seo is a key element in establishing "video.yoursite.com" - and viral-driven linking helps that. - Finally, videos now appear in Google's Universal Search. Video SEO now is mainstream SEO.
Video for Pharmaceutical Companies - Less fun, but not uninteresting (think discovery channel) - On-site strategy doesn't have to dovetail with portal strategy - On-site: -- Interviews with patients make the drug more real, more trustworthy. - At the video portals: -- Newsworthy topics: AIDS, flu outbreaks, fad diets. -- Mechanism of action: animations of how the drug works (cool site potential at Digg, etc).
Video for e-Commerce - Follow the buzz - Showcase your hottest products - Showcase anticipated uses -- Demo high-tech products -- If you sell power tools, build a deck -- Cars? test drives. - iPhone: the poster child for a video aware product launch. - Be entertaining -- YouTube is not a tradeshow. -- Even a boring product can inspire a fun video -- BlendTec destroys an iPhone: 1.7 million views. -- Digg, Slashdot, MakeZine, and Gizmodo love weird/unusual videos.
Video for Consumer Packaged Goods - Who wants to see a video about laundry detergent? - Some products can create tremendous buzz -- be choosy and/or get creative. - So far, it's mostly been accidental fame. - Videos with millions of views start to rival your TV advertising
Now with Universal Search, videos can become a prominent and permanent addition to brand equity.
Wrap-Up - Video pages are strong contenders in regular search results, thanks to viral-driven linking. - Most of today's video search "success stories" are happy accidents. - Product demos, testimonials, entertaining commercfials, anything that adds dimension to the product.
Jeremy Clem
The opportunity: - 75% of Internet users watch an average of 158 minutes of online video in May, 2007. - They viewed more than 8.3 billion video streams - 72% watched news video online, 27% at least once a week - 76% help drive the viral (pass to friends)
The market share: - 49.12% YouTube - 12.82% MySpace TV - 5.27% Google Video
Roadblocks: - Search is still very dependent on text from videos corresponding web page. - Lack simple and consistent taxonomy for site producers to use. - Video technology unfriendly to search engine crawlers.
The people that reap the benefts from spikes in search volume, as far as video goes, are people who have their web pages well optimized for the "hot" keywords. Make sure you surround your video with html.. include content. See new CNBC.com videos for examples.
Social bookmarking tools should be added to video pages. Make it as easy as possible for people to distribute your content.
Make is easy for crawlers to find your video content. Keep all of your video content in one place. Perhaps a single directory off your root directory. Consider a Video Site Map. Make sure you're providing RSS feeds... yet another distribution feed. Tag your video files with relevant keywords. Tag video scenes and be as specific as possible. Allow your videos to be embeddable (as long as legally permissable depending on your content).
Brand Yourself in Video - Target generic video search terms like "news video" to build online brand awareness
Video Optimization Best Practices - Train editors to think like video searchers - Encode for the right keywords -- Title, description, and keyword fields are key -- Remove metadata noise - Use keywords in filename - One video per URL (avoid flash and pop-up players) - Add tagging
Gregory Markel
I'm going to skip over why video search is important. You can pull this presentation off the web when we're done here. You can go back to this and I want to have time for the meat and potatoes.
Video Search Engines One of the important things to note about the video SEs, is that some of the smaller players can provide astonishing results (when you least expect it) so don't neglect the small guys.
Video SE types: -- Crawler based: A small number fo video search engines like Tueveo.com actively crawl the web looking for video content on your website. -- Upload: These types of video SEs require that you upload your .mov, .avi, .wmv, etc. video source file. Exmaple Myspace.com, AOLvideo. YouTube, etc.
Boost your uploaded videos by having your "friends" comment on your videos, forward them to other friends, submit them to the social booking services, etc. Make sure your videos are tagged appropriately.
Optimize your RSS feeds with proper tagging and keywords.
There are two basic user approaches to video submission and view tracking: 1) Manual Submission 2) New! -- Automatic Bulk Submission -- Tubemogul (tubemogul.com) is a start-up out of Berkeley that submits your video to 9 engines. It's currently free and they provide reporting tools that show views, charts and graphs, etc.
Tips: - It appears YouTube is taking a single frame from a minute and 20 seconds in as your still image. Make sure THAT one is a great image and not boring. [ Tips list is HUGE and he ran out of time. Download his presentation for complete list ]
Stephen Baker
We're going to focus on some of the technologies that make videos more visible to the crawlers. We're a startup. Started in 2005 as Podzinger and recently rebranded so we wouldn't be pigeon-holed as just for podcasts.
Our core technology is Speech to Text, and we offer media merchandising - search and publishing solutions, live and on-demand, and software as a service.
The core online media problem is that the crawlers are just looking at keywords, metadata and anchor text. There's nothing about the what's in the file itself. However, if you can create a transcript of the content, you can provide the crawlers with a wealth of "aboutness" of this file. Transcripts are crawler friendly and content rich pages.
Once you have the transcripts generated, you can than move on to automating some of the currently manual processes like tagging and adding keywords because they can be culled from the transcript itself. The tags, of course, improve ad targeting and create a contextual advertising opportunity.
