Via Larry Kless, here’s Mark Robertson, the King of Video SEO, sharing some tips about video codecs, encoding, and other things we don’t quite understand… but know are important.
Until you or your agency are doing all these things as prescribed by Dr. Robertson, we recommend getting all of your content on YouTube. Turns out Google indexes YouTube videos, um, pretty darned well.
… be hurting you. Why do keep writing about video search-engine optimization?
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.
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.