This is my presentation for Pubcon 2009 - All about video search engine optimization for hosted website video content and for universal search optimization with regard to video content. Visit ReelSEO if you want more....

1. Video Search Engine Optimization

2. Why? Who cares about optimizing video?

3. People Search for Videos Web Search Volume: “Video(s)” vs. “News” vs. “God” vs. “Sex”

4. Videos Dominate Universal Search Results Videos Dominate Universal Search 38% of users who searched Google were served video in Universal search engine results pages Source – “Google Universal Search Results Searcher Penetration by Result Type” – ComScore – Jan 2008

5. Search Drives Video Traffic

7. query – Viral Video Marketing

8. Traffic goes directly to ReelSEO.com

10. Video Search Engine Indexing

11. Problems with video search mechanisms are evident: Discovery difficult – still learning to crawl flash Not YET able to “understand” video content – text reliance Advanced mechanisms are nascent and insufficient: Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) Only relevant if spoken word exists Concept detection Only as good as what goes in – quality Algorithms in Flux What does this mean? Search engines need to be told what a video is about Optimization is crucial to discovery, indexing, and ranking Video Search Indexing - Issues

12. Website Video SEO

13. The application of SEO best practices in order to ensure that video content achieves maximum discoverability across search engines & ultimately, visibility amongst your target audience Video SEO IS Helping search engines “understand” video content An extension of SEO A method to drive valuable traffic to your video content Video SEO is NOT Smoke & mirrors About “fooling” search engines What is Video SEO?

14. Approach SEO Holistically Follow general SEO principles for titles, URLs, metadata, H1, linking, etc… Page Rank Matters Provide Context to Surround Video Content Contextually related links (products, videos, articles Related on-page text (tags, captions, comments) Text transcripts of any audio content Accessibility + SEO Website Video SEO Tactics – Landing Page Video Landing Page Anatomy

15. Easiest = Link to Video File – traffic to video file vs. page Best = XML Sitemaps Google supports both MRSS and XML video sitemaps MRSS feeds Need location of video file Video file = same domain XML sitemaps Allows you to specify player, and whether to “allow play” in Google Video Tips for Sitemaps Robots.txt - include sitemaps and allow URL crawling Publish both video sitemap and regular xml sitemap (video + page) Titles are given disproportionate weighting Tell search engines which thumbnail to use Contact search engines for specific guidelines – many outdated Getting Video into Search Engines

17. Available via universal search resultsHow Google Video/Universal Video Works

18. Publishing “Twice cooked” - <object><embed></embed></object> Not XHTML compliant but cross-browser support Works well SWFObject dynamic Uses JS to embed video Uses JS for alt text content Haven't had much luck SWFObject static Relies on js to provide alt text content More coding Works best & provides alt text Don’t Don’t use popups – (i.e. “click to watch video”  pop-up) Publishing Flash

19. Thank You Mark R. Robertson, Founder www.reelseo.com Twitter.com/reelseo Facebook.com/reelseo