Viral Video Marketing

5 Tips For Optimizing Your Content For Video Marketing

The explosion of affordable high-definition video cameras, coupled with editing software that allow even beginners to assemble a movie, is glutting the online video space. A lot of what has been produced to date is completely weird and unprofessional, but examining the brief history of online video demonstrates that if you get enough attention to your content, you can make a fortune even with something quite stupid (“Chocolate Rain” anyone?)

The traffic generated by some of these strange little web videos has, of course, led to a keen interest in leveraging content for video marketing by web marketers. One goal is to have a company’s videos pop up when a user performs a search related to their product, but the problem is that audio and images within videos themselves are not currently indexable by search engines. This renders the content less effective unless certain actions are taken to make the content known to the online world.

Here are my 5 top tips to optimize your content for video marketing:

1. Optimize for search using the title, tags and descriptions fields. Common sense dictates that the text associated with and surrounding the actual video makes use of keywords and rich descriptions of what the heck the video is all about, doesn’t it? Well, explore some video content online and you will see that too many people disregard this; apparently some marketers think the content will stand on its own. Folly!

Description fields or summaries should be professionally written, complete with links to your website. Generously tag your videos with terms found in YouTube’s Keyword Tool. Use keywords in the title of the video and in the name of the actual video file. If you host the video yourself (not the preferred method; see tip #5), keeping one video per web page is better than sticking 10 videos on each. Short “how-to” videos and similar might benefit from having important audio transcribed and placed on the same page as the video, like this one starring yours truly. In this way you boost your keywords, and visitors can still get the information they came for if the video doesn’t load for whatever reason.

2. Leverage social media. Facebook easily allows you to share your videos in status updates and is my favorite way to get the word out immediately when I put a new spot up. In addition to Facebook, I liberally use Twitter, StumbleUpon and Digg for my content whether it’s a video or blog post. These can get you instant traffic as opposed to waiting to be crawled by the search engines.

3. Create a video site map. A video site map submitted to a search engine, such as through Google’s Webmaster Console, allows it to better locate and verify your video content. Not only does this make your video appear in Google Videos results but also in normal search results pages as they increasingly become hybrids that show webpages, video, live news and Twitter updates. Title, description, URL, thumbnail image and duration are the important fields that should be filled out for every video you need indexed. For more information, check out ReelSEO.com’s thorough Google Video Sitemap webinar featuring presentations from Google staff members.

4. Make high-quality stuff. Quality applies to both the content itself and the resolution of the final video. YouTube accepts large, high-definition video files without much trouble, so pixelated messes are now inexcusable. More and more people are connecting their home theaters to the Internet for content, so make sure your content will look and sound good on a 52” plasma. Hint: make Flash files (.flv) using H.264 compression for an excellent balance between small file size and gorgeous video.

The same rules for written content marketing apply to content for video marketing: engage, entertain, inform and involve your viewers to make them want to participate with you rather than click away.

5. Host on video sites rather than your own webpage. Google considers the number of views a video receives on YouTube in its ranking algorithm, so this is the top dog in the video food chain right now. AOL Video, Myspace, Vimeo and Google Video are also places where you want your content, as you can attract some of the millions of viewers who are just browsing on these sites. Another excellent reason to host your content for video marketing videos elsewhere is that your own bandwidth is spared, making it cheaper to run your website.

Follow my tips above for more traffic and moolah!