Tag Archives: tips

A Blog Post That Doesn’t Mention iPad (Video SEO)

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.

Make Your Videos Suck Less

Mkay I’ll provide some recently discovered, cool resources to make your videos suck less in a minute. First I’m going to rant, and you’ll either skip it or find it more insightful than the how-to-make video resources.

I once asked a voiceover professional how he got to where he was, and if he had any advice. “Well, you know Kevin,” he said, “it’s really an innate ability that can’t be learned.” I hadn’t heard something so ridiculous since my mom’s friend said, “Kevin I hear you want to make a career in radio or television. Don’t worry you’ll outgrow that.”

If you have nappy hair and zombie eyes you might want to consider an alternative passion than making videos. Otherwise, you're probably capable of improving.
If you have nappy hair and zombie eyes, find another hobby than making videos. Otherwise, you're probably capable of improving.

Yes I’m an unwitting optimist who believes a) people are inherently good, b) people can change for the better, and c) that most of us would be more successful if we focused on what we enjoy instead of “well rounding” ourselves. Schools would do well to help us figure out what we’re innately good at (and passionate about), and direct us that way. Likewise employers, instead of trying to “round everyone out” for the corporate ladder, ought to determine what gets a person excited, and hone that passion. We’ll all still have to perform some mundane tasks to accompany our thrills, but why turn a great engineer into a lousy manager of engineers? Go read Strengths Finder if you don’t understand what I’m talking about (you wouldn’t be the first or last). Last night I was reading Emotional Intelligence, and was reminded that IQ may correlate with life/career success, but is only about 20% predictable.

Don’t get me wrong- getting a well rounded education isn’t a mistake. I’m glad my dad talked me out of going to a school for video and film (I remember drooling over the Emerson brochure and loathing the idea of taking more biology, math and stats courses) instead of getting an undergraduate degree. He later urged me to pursue business school, when I discovered that my passion for writing wouldn’t likely cover rent much less a mortgage and kids. Two years of misery, but it certainly has since saved me from a lot of stupid mistakes.

Now where was I? Oh yeah- some video tips.

  1. If you haven’t read Steve Garfield’s book, “Get Seen,” check it out. Or visit SteveGarfield.com which looks like a suitcase from a well-travelled carpetbagger in the Great Depression… smacked full of widgets, stickers, callouts and labels.
  2. The Shirtless Apprentice remains a favorite collection that makes learning fun.
  3. Just discovered an ad for New York Video School via the web. Thinking about it, but that virtual commute might kill me.
  4. Nice website for royalty free sound effects is Fxhome. You gotta weed through some expensive software to find it because my bookmark vanished. Schwing.
  5. Watch any YouTube video not in the top 100 most popular. Tee hee.

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 Video to Top of Google Ranking (fart)

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.

Mark Robertson is the authoritative voice on video SEO, and his blog (ReelSEO) is a must-read. His post “SEO for Video” is essential reading.

I’m less savvy than Mark or other SEO/SEM experts, but I am a marketer who spends many waking hours trying to get my YouTube videos more views. Here’s ReelSEO’s Jeremy Scott’s piece about my previous “inside” scoops on YouTube and search (and his clever retort of my assertion that online-video will trump social media).

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.

YouTube’s New Blog & Video Site for Video Creators

YouTube began in 2005 with a focus on community, but in recent years has logically put most of its energy into luring more viewers with frequency, becoming profitable, and attracting professional content and ads. So it’s refreshing to see the birth of “Creators’ Corner,” with has both a blog and a spot on YouTube.

WillVideoForFood was, as the name implies, designed to help starving video creators improve and commercialize their work. But it’s written by a marketer (me), so it leans to the business and marketing side of the equation… leaving production and creative tips to more inspired websites and people. I consider myself creative, but not inspired enough to help others enrich their own creativity.

So along comes this blog and website by YouTube. I like the weekend challenge notion, which was something Revver did in its heyday. You can learn to do a product review or be inspired to make one of 9 easy video projects (some serious points for excerpting Julia Nunes to encourage you to sing).

I’m adding it to my malnourished blogroll, and hope they’ll point back.

Beyond the cat videos, viral hits, and popularity contests, there are throngs of isolated people with wonderful talent that deserves to be shared. And YouTube is now not just the amateur’s platform, but an onramp to the stage.

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:

  1. The obvious: make sure the video is good, short and engages. Tag it appropriately without spamming unrelated keywords.
  2. The semi-obvious: engage in the community, encourage comments and ratings.
  3. 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.

Top 5 Secrets to Profit Via Online Video

Yesterday I outlined the 5 magical secrets to making money via online video. I made it up while driving to NYC from my rural PA home, and used a forced “NALTS” acronym. It was the only way I’d remember it on stage at the Digital Content NewFront, and I still had to check my hat lid, where I had written them down as an emergency.

Hopefully the audience remembers these tips more than my pratfall, fart machine, and spinning beer caps.

You can also check out my free eBook (“How to Become Popular on YouTube Without Any Talent“).

  • Nickle: Keep it cheap. The “one man band” will always do better than a crew. I couldn’t have quit my day job if I had to share my YouTube revenue with a writer, editor, producer, agent and actors. Just me, a camera, and unpaid “actors.”
  • Amplify: There’s no online-video “prime time.” A homepage video on YouTube won’t guarantee an audience. You need to promote, collaborate, get involved with the community (the eBook gives you tips).
  • Listen: It’s not distribution it’s dialogue. Listen, react, talk back. Don’t “Oprahize” YouTube and use online-video for trailers. Get on camera and interact with the audience. Do collaborations with other famous peeps.
  • Theater: Go where the crowds are: Be in Regal not a tiny cinema. Fish where the fish are. YouTube. Use TubeMogul to post more broadly, but no f’ing microsites. As a marketer, I want my ad on the highway, not on some rest stop.
  • Sponsor: Bring your own sponsor. The money on CPM buys isn’t as interesting. Build content that’s entertaining but targeted to a niche that advertisers want to reach (moms, cooks, fisherman, financial, whatever). You can’t get a sponsor easily unless you have an audience, and if you’d rather let someone else hunt for the sponsor than check out Hitviews (disclaimer: I am its chief strategical officer).

There. Now go get rich. But as a reminder, if you’re focused on making money I would advise writing blogs about mortgage or investing. It’s very hard still to profit via online video, whether you’re talented or not.

I’m clearly motivated by sources other than money. I’ll have to ask a therapist what those motivations are.

Porn and Whatnot (How to Tag Your Way to the Top!)

Guest blog by Alan Lastufka (FallofAutumnDistro), video creator, emo, blogger and author of the forthcoming “YouTube: An Insider’s Guide to Climbing the Charts.”

Alan FallofautumndistroWhen uploading a new video to YouTube, or any other video-sharing site, you need to give a few pieces of information to the site because encoding software can’t actually watch your videos. Your title is important for tricking viewers into watching (they’ll think your video will be more interesting than it probably really is). Your description is important for whoring out links and shout-outs to other channels.

But your tags… your tags are where the real magic happens. Your tags are keywords used to place and rank your video within YouTube’s search results.

Even better, just like your video’s title, thumbnail and description, your tags — or keywords associated with your video — can be easily manipulated or gamed! Adding popular search words like “porn,” “sex,” “naked” and “guitar hero” to your video’s tags will give you a bump in views over the long run. In addition to appealing to the fourteen-year-old perverts, you could also include tags from recent popular news stories. Favorites this past week would have been “Bernie”, “Mac” and “RIP.” Users searching for news clips about an actor’s recent death would hopefully find your video waiting for them at the top of the search results.

Most users only tag their own channel name, or repeat the video’s title in their tags section. Get out of this habit now! You could be luring in a much larger audience if you only knew what they were searching for, and including those words in your tags.

For a list of the daily most popular search terms click here: http://google.com/trends

Also, if you’re lucky enough for your video to be monetized, your tags not only help pop your video into popular search results, but may determine which ads are placed beside and within your videos.

If you notice a cell phone company *cough*SamSung Instinct*cough* is spending a lot of money on a site-wide ad campaign, tagging the video with phone, electronics, or the product itself could help pull in some of that sweet Google ad revenue (assuming you’re a YouTube partner).

Okay…I’ve been taking an overly-sarcastic tone throughout this article. All of the above taken into account, it is a good idea for most content creators to make better use of their tags.

But for the love of koolsurfer24, please keep them relevant and appropriate for your video’s content. If your latest video documents your weekend fishing trip, don’t just leave “fishing” as your lone tag, include “boat”, “bait”, “catch”, “release”, “lake”, “fish”, “sport”, “tackle” and everything else related that you can think dream up.

Don’t try to cheat the rankings. Don’t game the system. Gamed views will only leave you feeling empty at the end of the day, can get you kicked off some sites, and at best, will get you a bad rep.

Alan Lastufka is on YouTube, BlogTV and occasionally writes for
his own blog,
ViralVideoWannabe. Alan is currently writing a book entitled
“YouTube: An Insider’s Guide to Climbing the Charts” for O’Reilly Media, Inc.

7 Commandments for Winning a Video Contest

Brett Slater (Slaters Garage) was doing radio production, song writing and voiceovers about a year ago. Now he’s integrated simple video into his mix, and is sweeping up contests one after another. How does he do it? Check out his seven commandments for winning a video contest.

I’ll tease you with three:

  1. Thou shalt be brief. 30-60 seconds.
  2. Honor thy target demo.
  3. Remember thy deadline, and keep it holy.

When you’ve learned the rules, enjoy the simplicity of this winner of a “Piece of Maine” contest (by Maine Realtors). It’s a low-production video with a great tune and soulful lyrics. Here’s a guy that celebrates a mindset that where you are — right now — is exactly where you want to be. He shows a map with Maine in red, and the rest of the U.S. as “insane.” All this makes it almost okay that he bought land once stolen from Indians (snap). The song made me smile because the definition of insanity is wanting to be be someone or somehere you’re not. And Slater is celebrating what he’s got and where he already is. 

I used to “free associate” Maine with the madness of Steven King (and maybe lobster on the shore, which I have, incidentally, checked off my bucket list). Now maybe when I consider stopping by Maine, I’ll envision fewer tentacles emerging from The Mist, and instead see Slater on a hammock singing this earworm.