2008 Video SEO Playbook

2008 Video
SEO PlaybookWhite paper
According to comScore, the number of videos viewed online now exceeds the total number of Web search queries. With over 11 billion monthly streams in the US alone, online video is thriving. With this comes the challenge of ensuring your content rises 1above the crowd. 2
Introduction
Search engine optimization (SEO) has been firmly established as a critical aspect of building and operating successful Web properties. Although SEO, or the lack thereof, is directly linked to a website's traffic profile, relatively few people have fully come up to speed on the mechanics of this impact. As a result, best practices within SEO are often regarded as an elusive "black art" known only to a privileged few-especially when it comes to video. With this white paper, we hope to de-mystify the world of video search, and in doing so, provide you with a practical framework for video SEO that lets you maximize the value of your video content.
We will take you through the following topics:
De-mystifying Video SEO Contextual Publishing Inbound Links Video Feeds & Sitemaps Metadata Site Architecture Emerging Techniques
© 2008 Brightcove Inc. All rights reserved.3
De-mystifying Video SEO
With the explosive growth of online video, traditional SEO According to MarketingSherpa, has taken on a new dimension: namely, video search and discovery. While video search shares many characteristics SEO is gaining in popularity among with traditional text-based search, it also has several unique marketers: 57% of those surveyed elements that make a nuanced strategy essential. For in 2007 said it outperforms other example, video search engines and text search engines use 2 similar heuristics and metadata to determine rankings, and tactics, compared with 45% in 2006.video sitemaps are, in essence, equivalent to text sitemaps. However, while text search engines index all the pages of Benchmark your success your website, video search engines index only those places One of the primary challenges of SEO is the lack of a clearly where video content appears-a smaller "tree" contained defined starting point; instead, where you begin with video within your site's overall sitemap. SEO is entirely dependent on your current site's performance and needs for improvement.While there are important differences to keep in mind between video and text content, SEO should be approached To evaluate your site's performance, consider the as a "whole site" or, even better, "whole brand" initiative that following tactics:applies across all of the content on your website. Many search Check your referrer logs - What do your logs say engines now even include video results alongside text search about how visitors arrive at your most popular video results, part of an effort to deliver universal, integrated results. pages? What percentage of that traffic has a search With this in mind, there are a several new ways to think about engine referrer? holistically optimizing your entire website, while at the same Perform sample test searches - Search for your time more deeply integrating your video content. content on popular video search engines using keywords that you expect to return your content. How frequently does your content appear? Does each word in the search result listing convey relevance to the user and invite a click?Analyze your users' behavior - What percentage of visitors are grabbing links to videos or sharing your content beyond your site? Test your curb appeal - Evaluate your site architecture from the perspective of visitors arriving from search results. Do your most popular landing pages encourage video viewing and make it easy to grab video links?
These are just a few ways to measure your current level of search engine optimization; we'll cover even more later Search results from Brightcove.tv in this white paper. It's important to recognize that your SEO actions have measurable results, which will shed further light on the most effective places to optimize.
© 2008 Brightcove Inc. All rights reserved.4
Observe, Tune, Observe Uncover New InsightsYou can think of your site traffic as a variable stream Insight into your site's SEO success can only be as good as of activity that fluctuates by time of day, by popular the tools you use. Your ability to make the... [download for more]