Did you know you can search YouTube comments for keywords? This comes in handy when you want to find out who’s trashing you in videos.
Here’s an example… click here to search video comments for the word Nalts.
Tag Archives: Search
What You Don’t Know About Videos & Search Engines Can…
… be hurting you. Why do keep writing about video search-engine optimization?
- Your viewers or customers are increasingly using specific terms in their search, and including the word “video” into searches more than the word “sex.” In the past 5 years the term “how to” has grown steadily as a search phrase (Google analytics).
- Eye charts show that when a thumbnail image (representing a video) appears among a search-page results it gets an early glance before people read.
- Approximately a third of the views of a video are driven by search. It may surprise you that search engines overtook social media as a driver to videos back in early 2008 (Hitwise, 2009 via ReelSEO).
- Google, by far the leading search engine, incorporates many forms of media in its results. Since it currently indexes far more text than video, you have a distinct advantage with video content.
There are two solutions: the hard way and the easy way. The hard way: you can ensure you or your agency is current on video SEO techniques. The second is that you post content on YouTube (which Google crawls quite well) and ensure that your title, description and keywords are aligned and words are ranked by priority. Don’t try to optimize against impossible phrases with lots of competition. Be specific and add words people are increasingly adding to search queries (video, how to, etc).
Larry Kless did a nice summary of the Online Video Platform Summit (sounds saucy, huh), and quotes SEO Video Guru Mark Robertson. Nico McLane discussed her article from StreamingMedia that is subtitled “The secret’s in the sauce, but nobody’s sharing their recipes.”
Robertson puts it simply, “video SEO is purely an extension of SEO.” The more I research it, the more I realize it’s true. The tips for optimizing video content, with some exceptions, are typical of a good search-engine optimization plan.
Getting Your Videos to Rank High on Google
I just spoke with the Guru of Video SEO, Mark Robertson, to get some input on my chapter on video SEO (for “Beyond Viral Video”). I don’t think I succeeded on convincing him to just write the chapter (with credit, of course), but he’s been very generous with his insights. He’s got the smack daddy of resources on this subject, and had an answer for every questions I could ask.
I’ve obsessed with using YouTube as the fast-track to Google results, but Mark reminds me that it’s only one part of the puzzle. Equally important, perhaps, is ensuring that video content on your own website ranks high, and that it displays thumbnails you create. This is especially true if you’re trying to sell something (versus drive awareness). We already know that YouTubers don’t leave YouTube easily.
I’m still keen on brands (and creators and bloggers) getting content on YouTube because it’s the dominant video site, and more searches occur on YouTube than Yahoo or MSN. But that doesn’t mean we give up trying to optimize video on our own little desert-island websites.
My key take away from the call with Mark: While it’s easier to optimize your content using YouTube, most people would prefer to have the results display their own website. So your focus depends on who you are:
- Small businesses or bloggers that lack a well-indexed website and technical resources: you’re much better off getting your videos found on Google by using YouTube.
- Large brands are wise to concurrently upload video content to YouTube and their own site. It can’t hurt (at least in the near term it’s unlikely you’d be penalized for repetitive content).
- Any sophisticated website should deploy Mark’s best-practices to ensure the site is SEO’d for video. The structure of the site has to make it easy for Google. And you generally don’t want to embed a YouTube video on your site, because that just makes it more likely for the YouTube URL to show up (instead of your own site, if that’s important).
Benjamin Wayne, SearchEngineWatch, published some good questions to ask your agency (or video platform provider, or technical geek) to ensure your videos aren’t invisible:
- Will you index both my video permalink pages and the videos themselves?
- Will links point back to my site, or will they drive traffic to pages hosted by the video platform provider?
- How often will feeds be updated?
- In which search engines will my results appear?
- Do you still live with your mom? (okay I added that one)
- How will I be able to track click-through and ROI?
Want to see what your eye might be doing as you search content on Google? Check it out:
How to Search YouTube Comments
It’s now easy to search YouTube comments without diving into each video and clicking “show all comments.” In a vital move, Google now invites you to search ALL COMMENTS here. Nice job, Google & YouTube. I’ve been begging for this, and with this and the Twitter partnership… you’ve become a real-time engine again.
I can only imagine you’re now developing something that will make social-media monitoring tools obsolete.
YouTube comments are another channel to mine for your brand (or ego surf). We can only hope that Google will provide some advanced filtering. For instance, eliminating spam or allowing us to search by “influence” as defined by the video or commenter.
Although YouTube doesn’t make it easy to spam comments, it’s now quite easy to add noise to this channel. For instance, I can type “Starburst” over and over again in various comments, and Starbucks might think it’s suddenly getting buzz. Or I could ask all of my viewers to type “Citibank sucks” in the comments, and that might set off alarms in the secret Citibank monitoring cabin.
But we can trust Mother Google to solve for that.
Google & Twitter & Real-Time Search, Oh My!
I beg your pardon. While I’ve been bustin’ on Google for not keeping up on real-time search, I neglected to read this announcement 6 days later… Seems the folks at Twitter and Google have reached an agreement, and we’ll soon see Twitter indexed on Google. Clearly my post was the impetus, and I’m glad to see my recreational blogging is impacting corporate America.
I’d also encourage Google to allow YouTube comments to be queried, giving people another mechanism for monitoring. And if it happens, we’ll need no further evidence than this post to confirm I made it happen.
I’d also like a special Google logo for my birthday on May 12. Plenty of time to work on it, Dennis.
YouTube is a Search Engine, Dummy
YouTube was once a popular video-sharing site built on community. That community is still critical to gaining and keeping a large audience, but heat maps show the YouTube masthead is HAWT around the search field, and YouTube is now the second most-popular search engine after Google. It beats MSN and Yahoo. Or YahooMSN.
ReelSEO has posted a “best of” all of the wisdom for optimizing your videos for search. Read them or be doomed.
Mark Robinson has a wealth of knowledge on this subject, and shares advice from others… like this TubeMogul video about optimizing. Last week I asked TubeMogul to allow us to insert different tags when we upload to various sites (currently tags are entered once for all of the video-sharing sites TubeMogul feeds). Then we can increase our odds by trying different keywords for each video. Not a pure study, since the confounding variable is the website itself, our popularity on that site, and the ability of the video-sharing site to rank at all (some are better than others).
ReelSEO also has a video by Google’s Matthew Liu that gives us some insights on how Google/YouTube ranks videos. They fall into three categories:
- The obvious: make sure the video is good, short and engages. Tag it appropriately without spamming unrelated keywords.
- The semi-obvious: engage in the community, encourage comments and ratings.
- The secret clue: Matthew, at the end, eludes to ensuring that the content is consumed. That suggests two things… be sure it’s short (duh) but also keep the viewer engaged to the end. If your viewers complete the video, the video gets an unseen “attention score” that (I believe) will become the biggest variable. If you have a lot of important text at the end, the viewer will “scrub” the player to reread the text, and that translates to the engine as “yummy content.”
Nalts “Tip of the Day”: Toss in some important text at the end that may require people to pause or replay the last few minutes. Then add a little black to keep them from wandering off to related videos.
Nalts “Bonus Tip of the Day”: In my recent “Killer Caterpillar” video I didn’t pull the typical “please rate” or the ShayCarl “rate 5!” plea. Instead, I simply told viewers that only 1 in 100 actually rate a video. While I don’t expect this ratio to last, the video got 2,000 ratings on a video seen only 12,000 times. That means 1/6 of the people rated… which is highly unusual. The video is short and took more time than usual, so that also helped… but I thin the high rating ratio contributed to it being the 21st most popular video of the day. Getting ranked as the most popular has become increasingly more difficult since YouTube merged most-popular with most-viewed. And I just spent an hour surfing the most popular to see what I could deduce. It’s primarily driven by a deep fan base: the creators that are deep in the community still rank high, even if the occasional one-hit wonder finds its way.
Find Videos Even When You’re Not Searching For ’em
Veoh Video Compass (via TechCrunch) is being downloaded 25K per day, and gives you video results via a browser plug in — whether or not you happen to be searching for videos.
Neat idea, and it’s an unmet need since Google and YouTube haven’t yet solved for this. Eventually search results will be as vital to video distribution as any network, channel and broadcaster.
If ýou’re not on the top results for the word “fart,” then your fart content won’t be seen as often as others. 🙂
Veoh's Hail Mary: Spreading Video Search Across The Web With Video Compass
New Sitemaps: Can Google Crawl the Video on Your Site?
An important note from Google about how to ensure your videos are easy for Google to find…
Video Sitemaps: Make your videos discoverable
[Original Post by Amit Paunikar, Product Manager]
Indexing video content presents some unique challenges, and if you have videos on your site, you’re probably wondering how to make sure your videos are discoverable through Google. We want video publishers to know that we’ve made it easier to submit your videos to Google. First, we’ve simplified the submission process for sharing your Sitemaps with Google. Second, we also extended our Video Sitemaps support to include Media RSS feeds. You do not have to specify the Sitemap file type—we’ll determine the type of data you’re submitting automatically.
The more information you make available, the easier it is for us to crawl your videos. Here are a few simple things you can include in your Sitemaps to make your videos easier to find:
1) Landing page URL: This is the page where the video is hosted. It’s better to have a unique landing page for each video on your site.
2) Video thumbnail URL: Thumbnails provide a strong visual cue to the user. Your video thumbnail should be representative of a snapshot from the video, and should not be misleading in any way.
3) Title & Description: If these are accurate and descriptive, they not only help Google understand your video, but also help users choose the best video search result. Providing information about category, keyword tags and duration is always helpful.
Whether or not you have Video Sitemaps or MRSS feeds, of course, it’s important that you make sure that Google can crawl and index your video sites correctly. Make sure you understand how Google crawls, indexes and serves the web. Review the Webmaster Guidelines that will help Google find, index and rank your site. We’ve also updated the Google Video Help Center to include more information for video publishers. While there’s no guarantee that our spiders will find a particular site, following these guidelines should increase the chances of finding videos from your site in the search results.
Online Video & SEO
I don’t often quote press releases, but this release by Vmatrix is quite accurate:
Two hottest trends in online marketing – streaming video and video SEO – will take off in popularity in 2009. According to online marketing studies, Google’s universal search algorythms, which allow multimedia to appear in search results along with web page links, will change the look of Google search results. More video links and thumbnail images of video links will be seen on Google because more people are searching for video than website content.
I trust that marketers will start posting video content on YouTube if only to help SEO rankings. It works, and in fact Google (not surprisingly) is rather kind to video. Not only do my videos get indexed quickly for terms, but my thumbnail (the image) appears on results. You can’t buy that kind of attention using paid-search ads (remember the eye-trackers show that more than 80% of the attention goes to organic rankings not ads, and ads don’t permit images).
Getting Your Videos Seen With Search
Last week I wrote one of my more seminal posts on the convergence of paid search and video. Those who comment on my blog, of course, are rather indifferent about these vital topics and would just prefer me to stick with such topics as farts and YouTube drama.
Alas, I finally know how our summer Spanish teacher felt when our class (a motley crew of rejects that simply needed a passing grade to graduate) insisted that she play Spanish soap operas and stop trying to teach us vocabulary. For the most part, we’d just put “o” at the end of the word and it would sound sufficiently translated.
That said, I must persist and I have a ruler in my hand. You see, the percentage of video views attributed to search engines is growing rapidly. And I had forgotten sweet ReelSEO which had fallen accidentally on my iGoogle when I took it for a strict SEM blog. It has some great articles on video too. Here’s a recent piece by Michael Bunnell that has some summaries of the “Video Search Engine Optimization” session that took place in San Jose at the SES (search engine strategies) conference.
Check out the comments by Greg Markel, founder of Infuse Creative, LLC. He’s got some nice wisdom, including a remidner to have your killer link in the top of your description as the rest gets truncated. It might help that paultry view-to-click ratio (although I’d expect 1-4 percent tops anyway).
In related news, Mike Abundo (pictured here in a sassy photo and see his blog here) writes about how marketers and creators may be able to buy YouTube text links on search results to support the SEO techniques Markel suggests.