Using Video For Marketing & SEO

February 23, 2010

Video is fast becoming a key differentiator between companies that are actively marketing themselves and engaging in communication with their prospects and customers, and those companies that are plodding along, relying on the same old tactics to keep them afloat.

If you want to take the step into video, you might be unsure as to what you can create and how you should promote it. This is where we come in! Read on..,

There are many topics that you can create videos on:

• How to guides
• Demonstrations of your products
• Interviews with staff
• Interviews with customers
• Interviews with leading industry members
• Showcasing your office
• A summary showing a recent event you attended/hosted
• Advice on industry related topics

The list is really as endless as your imagination. Depending on your industry, your videos can be very lighthearted in their approach, or may have to be more serious. However, there really isn’t any company out there who wouldn’t benefit from promoting themselves and their website with videos.

So what are the basics of promoting and making the most of your video? This post doesn’t go into too much detail about the do’s and don’ts of shooting your videos and the content you produce, but focuses on what you should do with your videos once they’re ready to be let loose!

Ideally the video should be hosted on the main website and on other video sites such as YouTube; there are benefits to both, but in order to get full earch engine optimisation (SEO) credit, it must really be on the main site as a stand-alone video.

Making the Video

• Make sure that there is a logo/branding on it all the way through so people can’t reuse it without passing on credit to you
• Try and keep video length to under five minutes
• Make sure there is a strong call to action at the end along with your contact details
• Try and make the video thumbnail attractive to convince people to watch

Hosting the Video

• Use keywords in the filename of the video, and any titles and descriptions and the URL of the page it sits on
  • Ideally all videos should sit under one URL on the main site – www.url.com/videos/
  • Each video should have it’s own URL – www.url.com/videos/video-1
  • Optimise the page on the website that is hosting/linking to the site, i.e. good title, meta description, good copy (paragraph or two explaining what the video is), good headers, use of bold text etc
  • If the video is going to be hosted on the main website create video sitemap and submit it to video and content engines. This is quite technical (there isn’t really an easy way of doing this, so someone techie may have to do it. See Google’s advice page: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=80472&ctx=sibling
  • Create a transcript
    • This can be used as a blog post, which can be linked to the video
    • This can also be uploaded on YouTube (under the ‘Captions’ section)

Uploading the Video

• When uploading to video sites, make sure the titles, descriptions, tags are keyword rich
  • Put the main URL at the beginning of the description, i.e. “www.url.co.uk/videos/video-1: This video looks at the produc X. How does it work and how can it help you?”
• List of video sites you may want to upload to:
• Download.com and CNET TV – www.cnettv.com
• Youtube - www.youtube.com
• MetaCafe – www.metacafe.com
• Revver – www.revver.com
• MSN Live Video Search – http://video.msn.com/video.aspx.
• BlipTV – www.blip.tv
  • When you upload to BlipTV, your videos can be syndicated to accounts you have on other Web sites such as blogs, iTunes , Yahoo Video, AOL Video, MySpace, FaceBook, and Feedburner.
• Veoh – www.veoh.com
  • When you submit to Veoh, they syndicate your video to youtube, myspace, and google video.
• AOL Video – www. http://video.aol.com/
• Myspace Video -http://vids.myspace.com/
• Break – www.break.com
• DivX’s Stage 6 – http://stage6.divx.com/
• Daily Motion – www.dailymotion.com
• Vimeo – www.vimeo.com
• Sevelload – en.sevenload.com

• TubeMogul is a free tool to submit videos to multiple video sharing sites in one go. Currently it works with Metacafe, MySpace, Yahoo, Revver, AOL Video, DailyMotion, Blip, and BrightCove

Promoting the Video

• Try and make some links to the video – blog post, article, press releases pointing to the source
• Promote the video with the standard social bookmarking sites (Digg, Stumbleupon etc) to build links
• You can also visit relevant forums and mention it when appropriate
• Tweet about it
• Upload to your Facebook business page
• Submit the video itself to video engines:
  • http://www.blinkx.com/
  • http://en.fooooo.com/
  • http://video.search.yahoo.com/
  • http://uk.truveo.com/
  • http://www.videosurf.com/
  • http://video.filestube.com/
  • http://clipta.com/
  • http://www.pixsy.com/
  • http://video.aol.com/

If you want any further advice or assistance with your promotional videos, please give us a call on 023 8083 7271 or email us on info@SMEketing.com

Filed under: Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), Social Media Marketing

Tags: video marketing, video seo