I’ve grown increasingly frustrated with social-media monitoring tools, and their inability to filter out old content or spam bots using my old content. It’s very easy for me to assess a social-media tool by querying my own name (Nalts). I know instantly what content about me is new, and can recognize old content that has been repurposed by spam sites, which often grab my old blogs and video descriptions to fool search engines and people into thinking they’re not autobots.
Here’s an example from my Google Alerts, which I am about to discontinue. None of this is new! Even Google can’t determine what’s old anymore... and some of this links to my own blog posts that are ancient. This makes me question the prevailing myth that Google will overtake the social-media monitoring landscape with its own free solution.
Is there a solution? Even the best social-media tools can’t seem to discern between legitimate recent posts (of me anyway) that are on my sites or others.
… 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).
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.
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).
These guys aren’t lounge singers. They’re accomplished attorneys, engineers and technology executives from little schools like Princeton, Stanford and Yale (meet them). Their a cappella voices just happen to be the cherry on their intellectual banana split.
Parenthetically, my old boss knows these guys, and first brought them to my attention the bubble parody in December 2007 (I called it a seminal viral moment). The “Here Comes Another Bubble” spoof viralinated, but lost much of its traction when the creators had to pull the original video. Seems photographer Lane Hartwell bitched about her photo showing up in the bubble song for about .04 seconds. That sent me on a wild mission… challenging fellow video creators to exploit her work in video (see my Dec. 2007 video rant). There are nine videos pooping on Hartwell that still exist.
Some favorite lyrics of this new doozy:
“His name was Michael (Arington). He was the blog king. But deep inside he really felt he should be hardware king as well. He took a napkin, and drew a tablet. He called a group in Singapore to ship his Crunchpad out the door. But Singapore said “psyche.” They tore the napkin, Mike. Your old Crunchpad is now our JooJoo, so go take a hike.”
“His name was Eric (Schmidt). He wanted downloads. But Apple’s ruthless App Store Cops wouldn’t give his products props. They blocked his map app. And Google Voice too. At first we blamed AT&T but even fanboys came to see that their beloved Steve had something up his sleeve. They were locked in an iPhone prison and they could not leave…. open or closed either way you are hosed at the Valley.”
“His name was Rupert (Murdock). He was a mogul. But then the Internet arrived and Rupert saw/watched his profits dive. He claimed that Google was stealing content. The Googlers said that you’re so dexted just go and change your robot.txt… No we will never pay to search the WSJ. Cause the journal gets all its news from bloggers anyway (roar from crowd).
These are all clever spoofs of important moments in the technology evolution/war… little moments that point to major issues about the implications of open/closed technology, intellectual property theft, rights protection. Set to the tune of Copacabana by Barry Manilow, the parody takes on a number of super-geeky technology themes, including (1) Mike Arrington’s CrunchPad debacle, (2) the Apple vs. Google Voice conflict, and (3) the threat by News Corp to de-index itself from Google.
Sometimes I feel dangerously detached from the latest technology news, but I found myself getting most of these references, and watching my laptop dance on my chuckling-induced bouncing belly.
I met recently with Steve Rubel, who Business Week once called “the all-knowing thumper in a forrest of bambinos.” He’s dumped his Micropersuasion, but still posts on SteveRubel.com.
Steve asked me what I knew about video and SEO, and prompted this succinct 101-post on “how to use online-video to crawl your way to the top of Google rankings.” As I’ve reminded you before, YouTube is the second most important search engine, and YouTube videos get a strong advantage on Google. When you search a term, and see a video thumbnail someone’s done their homework.
Sure you can buy text ads surrounding these Google searches, but they will burn through a budget fas. Furthermore, searchers usually jump to the “organic” or “natural” results that aren’t in yellow. Google eye-tracking charts have proven that, and undisclosed eye-charts of YouTube show that the primary navigation attracts eyes to that coveted search field. I’m not suggesting “either/or.” You want to appear for key searches anyway you can… even if you’re buying ads on searches that you already organically dominate. I have fought this logic, but the text ads for your brand name usually yield the highest-quality traffic (even if they MIGHT have found you without the ads).
Your thumbnail in the red area is worth more than text ads
Now some fresh tips and secrets for helping your video content rise on Google results, where you are exponentially more likely to be discovered by curious prospects.
1) Put Your Video in Places Easy for Search ‘Spiders” to Find. Your video content is either on YouTube or it’s hiding. Google’s automatic “spiders” dig routinely through your site, but don’t make them work too hard. If you have videos streaming on Quicktime on your website, then don’t expect them to get discovered easily (especially if they’re buried deep). Start posting on YouTube, then use TubeMogul to go more broadly (a free tool that distributes videos to dozens of existing online-video accounts, as long as you have accounts on them). I have asked TubeMogul’s CEO (Brett Wilson) to allow video publishers to vary keyword tags by site; currently you tag your video the same for all sites, which doesn’t allow you to experiment and hedge bets. That will increase odds of “Mother Google” blessing you with first-page result for niche terms. Again, if your video is on your brand site it might as well be in a file cabinet.
2) Oddly, Metadata Still Works. Metadata includes the title, description and keywords that search engines can use to find your content. Be selective, and go for targeted terms. Don’t try “digital camera,” but something more narrow like “how to buy cheap video cameras.” Then be consistent with your title, first words of your description, and the keywords. This can be challenging, because viewers like short irresistible titles… but spiders will index based on common search terms or phrases.
3) Engagement Matters. A well-viewed, top rated, commented, favorited video is going to work MUCH better than one you post solo. That’s why the YouTube stars (already popular amateurs or pros) have an edge on the rest. Their active fan following moves them to top of most-viewed videos, and makes them easy for a new audience to discover them. This is one of the reasons I urge marketers to tap into the credible platform of a weblebrity instead of posting their own videos. If I upload a video on my “Nalts” channel, it’s going to do better on SEO than the same exact video posted to a new account or your account. Many people attempt to replicate this by asking friends and family to “5 star, favorite, and comment.” But a few dozen people aren’t as powerful as the thousands of active fans that rate their favorite creators 5 stars even before watching the full video.
4) YouTube is Getting Smarter about weeding out videos boasting provocative thumbnails (the images that represent the video on YouTube or Google search results). So in time, pictures of neon graphics (a hot trend) and boobies (a timeless certainty) will not outrank relevancy. Ultimately I expect YouTube to rank videos based, in part, on “attention scores.” As a YouTube Partner I know which of my videos have high “attention scores,” which is a relative score based on videos that are of similar duration. I can’t tell precisely how many people stopped watching at a specific moment (or the average view duration) but I can see where most people dropped, and I try to manage that by “teasing” video that comes later. If a video for a particular term has a high “attention score,” then Google/YouTube can correctly assume it was relevant to the searcher. So I’d expect that to be as vital as transcribed text, and Google/YouTube already has the ability to connect these (and may well be using them).
5) While Waiting for Transcription. Don’t hold your breath for Google to transcribe videos, which will be the Holy Grail. Rubel observed that “Google Voice” is teaching Google to recognize various dialects, and that will come in handy when it’s time to transcribe and index video speech for word searches. In the meantime, you want your videos to be valuable/relevant and short (30-90 seconds), then compel action (like a visit to a website) with a meaningful promise. Remember it’s much easier to get a YouTube viewer to a channel page than to abandon YouTube. We’re still seeing click-thru rates (from YouTube to brand sites) in the low single digits. Some YouTube creators (like “CharlesTrippy” and “Shaycarl“) post daily videos as long as 10-12 minutes, which automatically propel them to the most popular page. This may give them an advantage, and I recently speculated that long videos may, counter intuitively, be a view driver. I’m now thinking that the frequency keeps them “top of mind” and forges a bond with their viewers, which is the real driver. Still, their fans will watch more of those videos than typical videos of that duration… and that certainly should help. While we wait for transcribed search, consider captioning your content (it’s time consuming but free on various sites) or adding a full or partial text transcript to your description.
5) The basics of SEO apply when it comes to keywords. Spell hot ones wrong on purpose, focus on less competitive terms/phrases, and use desired ones first. Before Google stopped using metatags to rank, it always put exponential emphasis on the first word than the fifth. So consider carefully the first words you’ll use in sequence, and don’t try to fight for highly competitive terms. I used to automatically use “Nalts” as a keyword, but now I place that at the end of my list. Sometimes I’ll use a partial phrase like “how, to, become, popular, on, youtube,” and name the video similarly. Then my description will begin with “How to become popular on YouTube…”
6) I haven’t seen evidence that YouTube videos embedded on other sites have an advantage. Logically, an embedded video means bloggers and other websites find the content valuable… and YouTube videos used to show publicly (under video you’ll see “statistics and data” the sites that drove traffic to a video, but have inexplicably eliminated that somewhat recently). It was probably being abused by spammers. Google tends to focus on relevancy rather than monetization, but it’s hard to ignore a motivator YouTube has: the site can monetize videos on its own site easier than on other sites. So it’s in Google’s financial interest to reward video content that draws traffic to YouTube rather than embedded videos on sites that use its bandwidth without creating a premium for advertisers. We know that if hundreds of websites link to President George Bush using a hyperlink called “stupid,” then he’ll rise on search results for the word stupid. So perhaps my top ranking for the keyword “fart” was helped by any sites that linked to me with the tag, “fart video.”
But there’s a true relevancy factor at play. If you’re inclined to search “fart,” I’m guessing a video of a kid with a fart machine is one of the things you may be hoping to find. Or maybe you were seeking a nice medical definition or the origin of the word (Wikipedia, which now has trumped me, indicates “immediate roots are in the Middle English words ferten,feortan or farten; which is akin to the Old High German word ferzan. Cognates are found in old Norse, Slavic and also Greek and Sanskrit.”
7) Timing. Michael Buckley’s “What The Buck” show and Sxephil’s vlogs benefit greatly from their regular content about topics being searched. Their recent videos are often between 500K to a million, and they have some videos that are cash cows for certain subjects (garnering regular views that are in the multi-millions). As I write, they’re no doubt making a video about the Golden Globes, knowing that on Tuesday people will return to work, and be grazing for recaps. This timely content also serves as “link bait” to popular social-media sites that are looking for current videos about hot content. Topicality is important, and the best personal example I can provide is my 2009 Superbowl “best commercials” video. It maintains a poor attention score (lots of early drops relative to most of my videos), but I launched it before last year’s Superbowl game… fetching it 3-4 million views in the days after last February’s game… and it’s up to 7 million now. The GoDaddy boob thumbnail doesn’t hurt either, but that’s not helping the attention score. If you want boobies, you’re turned off to see a dad and his kid talking about the best ads. If I did a daily vlog about the hot terms I found on Yahoo Buzz, I’m quite certain I could dramatically expand my daily views from 150K-200K to 500K. But alas I have neither the time nor interest. I’m guessing Buckley and Phil scour many sites to find out what content people are searching each day.
8) Untapped Secret: SEM on YouTube. I almost hate to give this away. But if you have an Adsense/Adwords account and you’re a YouTube partner, you can advertise your video based on keyword terms. This drives search-driven ads that display your video to a targeted audience, and is not expensive for most terms (a cost-per-click bid of a few pennies sometimes works). Even better, you’re then able to put your own simple “InVideo” ad over the video with a clickable hyperlink. See the example on my “Hair Transplant Fun,” which is more likely to drive viewers to my blog than a hyperlink in the description. And remember: get that hyperlink early in the description so it appears to viewers in a truncated description.
Now a few things that don’t work, or at least will die soon enough.
I’m finding lots of spam automatic blogs that are now embedding my videos and descriptions hoping to trick Google into indexing it. This annoying technique is also fooling Radian6 and other social-media monitoring tools, which report this old content as new. Last week I tried a “Nalts” search on Radian6 and was frustrated to see old video descriptions appearing as recent buzz about me. Maddening.
I’m also constantly finding my name packed with other YouTube usernames in videos by people who naively hope that works. Puh-leeze. Did that ever work? It’s a good technique if you’re mentioning a particular YouTuber, because we do tend to “ego surf” for content that tags our name. But as soon as I see 12 other names aside mine, I know it’s trolling.
Fake thumbnails might artificially drive views, but the video will be penalized when the attention scores show Google the video duped its users.
Sure, you think the TV is dead. But it’s not. The act of lazing about in front of a big screen TV watching, laughing and enjoying video content is going to be even bigger than ever. But here’s the rub. It’ll be less about cable and broadcast, and much more about internet video.
It boils down to this: If you’re not creating video with the big screen in mind, you’re going to miss one of the biggest developments in 2010.
We’ve already seen great success with Revision3‘s content on Roku; the tiny box that streams Netflix, baseball, Amazon, and now us. Along with Twitter, Pandora, Flickr and more all on the big screen.
We at Revision3 were up nearly 15% in the first two weeks that our channel launched – and that was during the traditional down weeks of Thanksgiving.
Next year TV will get smart.
Vizio, the biggest TV vendor in the US, will bring real connectivity to every TV it sells that’s larger than 45 inches. Many other TVs will do the same.
Unfortunately, YouTube seems to be asleep at the wheel. I asked them recently if they were going to play in over the top, they said they prefer to be browser-based rather than having separate interfaces. Sure, having multiple and separate interfaces can be tough, but their approach is wrong. Consider mobile – websites are terrible on that screen. The same goes for the big screen at 10 feet away.
But, let’s imagine I was led to speculation with my YouTube contacts, perhaps they were being… coy. We could very well find Android or Chrome jumping in and powering TVs by 2011.
We’ll see…
In the mean time, you can do a few things to ensure you don’t miss the boat in 2010.
First, produce and distribute in HD. If and when YouTube is available on the big screen, the better looking videos will win. Quality will always be more important in this world.
Second, think about an alternate channel for over the top. Try hooking up with Xbox, glom onto Roku with Mediafly or Blip.TV.
Most importantly, find ways to get your stuff into that world.
Oh, and keep an eye on Revision3 in early January. We’ll be covering the heck out of the annual Consumer Electronic Show, posting on our site, and on our popular YouTube Channel. We’ll be bringing you the latest over the top devices and provide commentary on how this brave new world of internet video is evolving.
Now you too can target an ad on a YouTube video with more precision than ever before.
Via YouTube/Google “Videotargeting” you can suggest videos based on keywords (like humor or entertainment), viewer demographics (age and gender), interest-based categories or some combination of the three. Read more on the YouTube Blog or Mashable.
Says Google/YouTube: Our goal is to create an easy-to-use, self-service targeting tool for any advertiser who wants to run ads on YouTube. As this first version is in beta (and is being updated every day), it’s missing a few features, as well as content from some of our partners — like those who sell their own ads, for example.
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.
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.
Naturally you’re saying to yourself, “surely Nalts must have an invite.” He’s a YouTube Partner and even painted his office the four colors of the Google logo. No. I don’t. And I’m not begging. In fact if I get an invite I might just RSVP, “sorry- busy on a Yahoo beta right now.”
In the meantime, you can go fool around with other products in Google Labs. Heck- you can even search photos by color preference.
