Sunday, November 2, 2008

Web Video Optimization

With the growing popularity of video on the web, people are finding new ways to promote their videos and be seen on search engine results as well. The video should portray and be able to send the message to the viewers. The other interesting fact is, creativity is really important when it comes to video marketing. If it is the same commercial you watch it on t.v, then well people would rather prefer that than go online and download something they are familiar with. It should be unique and the presentation should bring on the desire. Lets say you are selling a software, the best way to shoot online marketing video for it would be to show its best features highlighting on how easy it is to use. There are analytics tools like YouTube Insight which displays the statistics for the YouTube Videos like the number of views, the demographic and geographic views and the medium through which people have found a certain video.

I have collected few guidelines and tips on how you can promote and optimize your videos to get more traffic and views.

1. Keyword Research:
The first step includes keyword research. In order to optimize anything on web (a website, blog) you need to do proper keyword research. You need to list all the possible keywords relevant to your video. Next you need to check on the search results for these terms and see the performance of the top position results. You need to check their view counts, the feedback of the users, the posted date and the relevancy. These will help you find out how popular these key terms are along with how people react to it and it has already passed its due date. These will also help you come up with better video.

2. Video Editing:
You need to produce shorter and interesting clips to attract visitors. People are more thrilled by shorter videos than the longer ones and you can also submit short videos to the search engines. You can add your web address to the video as a graphic. You can also place a link to the original video on this shorter clip make this link your subdomain.

3. Video Format:
The format of the file plays an important part on optimizing it. It is necessary that it’s viewable by all kind of users. You need to offer various file formats compatible with Flash, Windows Media or Quicktime. You can use MPEG4 format for search engine submissions.

4. Data Rate:
There are many places in the world which are deprived of higher internet speed. The United States itself suffers from low speed compared to other developed countries. Hence it is better to provide two data rates, a smaller data rate about 200 – 300 kbps for people with slow internet speed and a larger data rate that is more than 600 kbps for faster connection.

5. File Names:
It is advisable to use keyword rich file names for your video. The most searched keyword term could be used separated with hyphens (-) or underscore ( _ ) works. If you can provide title of the video then you can place keywords there as well.

Promoting Videos:

YouTube is the best place to post your videos and get good amount of viewers. If you could make the YouTube homepage as the featured video, you get whole lot of attention from the viewers. For this to happen, your video needs to be really popular or liked by the YouTube moderators. So as for a start you can publish your video on social marketing sites. You can dig it, put a I like it tag on stumble upon or feature it on del.icio.us. The more comments and better ratings you get there are better chances of being placed on the pages of Google. Promoting the videos is an important step that needs to be carried out careful without spamming.