SEO for Multimedia and Rich Media

You guys still with me? I know it’s been a long day, but we still have TWO more jam-packed sessions to go.  This time it’s all about using rich media to woo visitors and increase engagement.  Speaking are Brian MacDonald, Morgan Brown, Wesley Cox and Marty Weintraub.  Let’s do this, friends.

First up is Wesley Cox. He kind of looks like Mr. Bean. And by “kind of” I mean, I actually thought it WAS Mr. Bean on stage.  It’s pretty cute. He hops onto the mic with a “hello, yo, how you doin?”  Well, then.  Oo, and now he dropped a y’all. This is going to be fun. He’s from Oklahoma. I guess that explains the “y’all”, however, it definitely doesn’t excuse the gangster talk.

He talks about the Oklahoma land run of 1889 where they gave away Oklahoma for free [I mean, of course they did. Who’d pay for Oklahoma. KIDDING!].

He looks at video search the same way. Video SEO can help you get easy rankings. The evolving landscape of integrated search has been interesting to watch. You used to see ten organic results…then they started added songs…then images, products, videos, and they even had election results. The search results from 2007 to 2010 have changed dramatically. What does this new integrated search landscape mean for SEO?

Google loves videos! They want to rank videos.  They’ve thrown it to the forefront of the SERPs.  Why is video the new cool thing?

Relevant search results = happy customer = more money for Google

There are a lot of videos out there, but a small proportion of videos that are highly optimized. Google is looking for your videos, you just have to make it easy for them to find you. There’s an open and heavy bias toward video right now. The low competition + the growing market = opportunity.

Wesley says that Video SEO is hotter than the young coeds Tiger Woods courts now that he’s a bachelor.  You can send your hate mail to him. I don’t want it.

Strategy: Video For Branding

1. Incredibly powerful brand touch-point
2. Effective way to communicate your brand position

Key Considerations

1. Core brand values
2. Products, services, offerings
3. Features and benefits
4. Key differentiators
5. Positioning
6. Integrated Communications

Various Styles of Videos

1. Promotional
2. Documentary
3. Learning & Teaching
4. News & Informational
5. Comedy & Entertainment

Production Tips

1. Camera Equipment
2. Lenses
3. Lighting
4. Special Effects
5. Motion Graphics

Production Process

1. Creative strategy
2. Storyboarding
3. Script Writing
4. Production Planning
5. Shooting
6. Editing

Optimizing Your Video Checklist

1. Title
2. Description
3. Tags
4. Captions

Click Thru & Conversion Considerations

1. Title
2. Content Quality
3. Production Quality
4. Call to Action Overlays
5. Clickable Regions

Promotion: Getting Views

Hosting on a third party can help you get maximum viewership, brand exposure, viral potential, etc.  However, you’re not getting any of the juice. If you want the juice, put the video on your site. You have more control over the video and will have more optimization options.

Measurement:

How can you track success?

1. Views
2. Comments
3. Ratings
4. Social Graphs

Next up is Morgan Brown.

Who cares about video? Well, the room is packed so obviously people care.  His parents also care. His mom keeps sending him Lady Gaga videos.  His mom is clearly way cooler than my mom. Video is going up, up and up. It’s a land grab. It’s very easy to do SEO positioning for video. There’s a lot of things you can learn, test, try. And if you fall on your face, you can start over easily, as well. The barriers to entry are low when it comes to SEO, but they’re a bit higher when it comes to the actual content.

Search is the number one referrer for video on the Web. Thirty-eight percent of online users find video via search.  Google loves videos. A video is 50 times more likely than a text page on the same topic to appear on Google’s first page of search results.  Video is beautiful in the SERPs. It’s super compelling and people love to click on it. The case is clear for video.

How do you take advantage?

25 Tips for Video Search Domination

1. Create Compelling Content [ooo, good, something new! ;)]
2. Save Your Money: You don’t need to spend a million dollars. You can do video inexpensively. He talks about YoYoPlay.com. They’ve done all their video via handheld cameras. It’s not good enough for TV, but it’s good enough to sell yo yos
3. Go short with your content. 19.4 percent of users abandon after 10 seconds.
4. Create thumbnails that get attention: Pick a human face – preferably an attractive human face.
5. Optimize your titles: SEO for video is like SEO was ten years ago. It’s the basics. When you think about titles, think about two things: You want the engines to find it (so use keywords), but you want it to be compelling enough that a human would click on it.
6. …And your descriptions:  Really focus on the first sentence or two.
7. Nail the End Slate: If someone has watched the whole video, make sure you give them something to do. Too many people worry about the video production, but they don’t think about the beginning and the end of it.
8. Make an Offer: Rite Aid gives people credits toward coupons for watching videos on their site.  They have more than 500,000 monthly video views and a 70 percent return viewer rate.
9. Make it easy to share: Videos with social media options get 20 percent more traffic.
10. Add Video to your Site: Video is a natural link builder and back links help build ranking. Control associated page text to optimize SEO. Use FB share and RDFa.
11. Get the basics right: Titles, descriptions, keywords, tags, file names, surrounding copy, valid video site maps.
12. Add transcripts: Provide the transcript inline with the video on the page.
13. Put video on pages that convert:  Zappos puts videos on their product pages because they’ve seen an increase in conversions on pages that have video.
14. Use video sitemaps
15. Put it on Facebook: Facebook is the #3 video news site on the Web. It’s rocketing up in terms of viewership. It’s also the #2 referred to YouTube.com. Video is amazing as a social object.
16. …and everywhere else!
17. Tweet it: New Twitter is made for rich media. Videos will play right on the person’s page.
18. Keep ’em watching: Create playlists, create annotations, etc.
19. Get Subscribers
20. Comment, comment, comment
21. Track and Learn: YouTube provides great analytics that you can take advantage of
22. Use Keywords: You can also use the keyword tool to come up with different traffic patterns
23. Maximize Benefits of Sharing
24. Drive views with Promoted Videos
25. Put it all together

Next up is Brian MacDonald.  He says he’s apparently the only one still using the lame PubCon template. Hee. Branding fails. :)

Multiple Upload Locations

Should I host videos on my site or post it to YouTube?

ManoftheHouse.com does both.  By putting videos on YouTube and the site, they can get the same video in the search results and compare clickthrough based on thumbail. Capitalize on Google & YouTube searches. Get to analyze different data.

Freedom Boat Club does everything. They put videos out on every video sharing site. They do it for greater exposure. Optimized for several targeted platforms and topics. Lets them cater video to the different demographics of each site.

Why upload to multiple places?

• Test thumbnails
• Monopolize search
• Alter content to match the platform

He has video sitemaps promoting all the content on their site.  Make sure your video titles matches up to the title on the page. They’ve also seen a big impact from including the gallery tag. Putting it in there helps the archive page to show up. Surround your video with original content.

Videos In Flash?

Include content on the page for people who don’t use Flash and can’t see the video.  Have a non-Flash backup version in plain HTML. You want to make it easy for both users and search engines. Backup content means better indexing, better thumbnails and better mobile. If you created the video, you already have the copy/script. Use it.

Next up is Marty Weintraub. He has no presentation and is doing some live work. We’ll see how much I can blog. :) He also passed out a paper cheat sheet for how to optimize for YouTube. No, really! PAPER! How novel.

Marty says he’s going to talk about two tools. So, if anything else, I can at least offer you their names.

The first tool is ScrapeBox.  The second tool is Mozenda.

Now we move onto the live demos.

He shows ScrapeBox first.  You enter a keyword and then it scrapes the results from Google Suggest, Yahoo Search Assist, Amazon Search Suggestions, Google Product Search and many, many others.  It creates a pretty kickass list.  He then puts that list in WordTracker.  It doesn’t do a lot of the synonym stuff for us, but we’re search marketers. We’re good at that stuff.  I can’t lie, this tool looks pretty awesome. I can only imagine what Rhea would do with it.

Onto Mozenda. To use it – download Mozenda, install. Download the agent, install it. Once there, you enter in a keyword and it will grab the first suggestion and search it to extract the organic videos that are there.  He shows the Excel doc created by the tool and I’m just sitting here with my mouth open. It basically creates a YouTube ranking report for Suggest.  It tells you the organic date, the user who uploaded it, the organic titles, etc. It’s pretty freakin’ kickass.  For more info on this one, scroll down to the bottom of this post about YouTube optimization.

Wow.  That was awesome!