Live: Video Search Marketing Beyond YouTube

Kevin Ryan: First up is William Leake from Apogee search marketing

William:

Thanks for joining. We know video is really growing. And it’s growing outside of YouTube. Despite more than doubling from Nov of 08 to Aug of09, Google actually lost a little share! And Hulu is the only oneo of the majors that have gained. So the market is becoming more fragmented.

Google has 40% share of videos. But there is still 60% left.

44% of videos are discovered randomly

43% are found via sharing

38% of users who searched Google were served a video

Generation 1.0 – Google video, AOL, Yahoo, Live

Gen 2.0 – used advanced recognition techniques- blinkx, clipblast, videocrawler

Basic options beyond YouTube – Hosted videos. We know the benefits of Posted-YouTube has a lot of traffic, people are already there. So it’s easier to go viral.

Benefits of hosted:

· Control – over related on-page text, encoded meta-data, user experience, etc.

· Control over monetization

· Generate traffic to your website

Website video SEO tips:

- Meta data, and lots of it!

- Offer multiple file formats

- Include keywords in the file name

- Include the video tag in the file name (so you rank where ppl are specifically looking for video- many people look for “kw video” and so take advantage of optimizing on that).

On page elements

- Follow SEO principals for optimizing meta data

- Definitely include contextually related links to articles and other videos

- Consider publishing captions and /or abstracts as additional content

Site Structure:

-use unique URLS

-one video per URL

-use embedded players, not a pop up window

Remember, Video is about sharing!

- Enable comments

- Include social bookmarking tools

- Allow visitors to subscribe to your videos

- Let viewers grab your embed code

Video and Local are the 2 places where the engines currently like to be submitted to. Don’t wait for them to find you, submit your video content. RSS video syndication is the way to go with that.

Thank you!

Next up is John McWeeny

John: We make videos using a network of filmmakers around the world.

25billion videos were watched in the month of august!

Search engines by query volume :

1. Google

2. YouTube

3. Yahoo!

Forrester put out an interested article a few months ago, about the easiest way to get a #1 ranking is to post a video. A video is 50 times more likely than a text page to appear on Google’s first position.

Creating embeddable players is a great way to get your video content shared. Make sure you name your files so they are descriptive and relevant.

I think that good content=more sharing=more visibility!

Example, Victoria’s Secret, has a strong Facebook presence, a video of pretty models has nearly 5,000 visitors and 500 comments!

Sears posted their commercials online, and got only 14 visitors.

So make content people want to watch, specifically for your consumer to engage with.

Good content=more linking=more page rank.

What can you do for audiences? Syndicate video to as many search engines as possible –Tube Mogul is a good site for this. Social media strategies such as FB widgets. Blogs, directories, niche publishers.

Get your message out on hire rankings site.

Build your video the right way: short and sweet! Shorter is better, don’t spend a fortune, include end slates with URLs (driving people back to your site), thumbnail images matter so make sure you freeze the frame on something engaging, like a person’s face.

Video is now showing up in Google Products pages.

Eric Papczun from Performics is next.

Eric:

[showing the most popular web videos of all time]

So the video is under 4 minutes, we have to grab the interest of users in such a short period of time! So how can I do this?

1. Create something interesting

2. Screen it

3. Tell a few friends about it

4. Encourage word of mouth

- How about doing an amazing stunt, or doing it badly?

- Cats acting like creepy humans

- A person kicking a baby

- Family member getting killed by a freak accident

- Random items exploding

- Get your children to take drugs and film the reaction

- Dance, dance, dance!

There is no question about it, people want to be entertained first and foremost.

Have high production values – give each video its own unique URL home, have the video launch from an HTML page, optimize metadata, make sure you use the world video in your filename.

Showcase your work – the thumbnail is very important, grab attention, it’s your call to action. You also want to specify in the XML exactly where the jpg for the thumbnail is so the engines can easily find it.

Promote your work-build internal links with relevant anchor text to the video page, create an MRSS feed, set up a Google XML sitemap.

Use video sharing sites, use tools, track viewership with analytics.

You can also advertise: Yahoo has a beta Rich Ads, which has videos in their ppc ads! This is only right now available for brand keywords, so if you can take advantage it. Early tests show that there is much higher CTR and conversion rate when folks are using this kind of advertising, and it’s not much more expensive.

YouTube promoted videos has a CPC pricing model, which is a great way to exploit the interest in videos that have reached critical mass (i.e. wedding dance video).

Google also has click to play video ads which display in Google’s content network.

Future considerations: Where are we going? Faster mobile devices (4G), flash for mobile platforms, flash embedded apps for iPhones, HTML 5 to allow for embedding videos more easily.

Learn from those who have gone before you!

Thanks!

Last but not least is Avi Wilensky of Promediacorp.

Avi:

Today I am going to show you how to leverage a video for link building!

Safe auto insurance case study- we got a midsize auto insurance company to rank on page one of the Google SERPs by running a video contest that went viral.

Shows how Safe Auto set up a video contest where users can upload their own rendition of themselves singing the famous Safe Auto Jingle.

The first prize was a $5,000 advertising contract. The winner was a church choir in Columbus Ohio which got 100,000 votes. The contest generated thousands of comments over a 90 day period, and the gold was 1800 natural backlinks.

Backlinks occurred within communities, for example the winning church choir generated buzz within the Christian community and so many links on blogs happened there, the second place winner, the Meshuga Notes Jewish Accapella group posted the contest on their own blog, their facebook pages, twitter feeds, etc. so they essentially created the links for us.

We also ran ads in Google’s content network on video contest websites, musician websites, etc. You would be surprised at how many people and websites are dedicated to entering contests all day long!

But most importantly were the communities around the video submissions which were key in promoting the contest and obtaining links.