Videos are important because they engage users and users search for videos in different ways than they search for written content.  If your web page includes videos as well as written content, logically, you will attract a larger audience.  It’s not enough just to place a video on your web page, though.  It needs to be optimized, as would any other content, to make it more accessible via search engines.  This blog strives to cover the basics of video search engine optimization, so that, at the very least, you can take the beginning steps to optimizing your featured multimedia.  To start, I’ll touch on how people search for videos, which types of videos can be crawled by search engines, how to create a video sitemap, and, in general, how to optimize videos.  Without further adieu, let’s get started.

First things first, how do people search for videos?

Search Engines – Now more than ever, Google is putting a lot of weight into videos, which makes it easy to find videos just as you would find any other web page.

In addition to video results showing up organically, Google has also implemented a video specific search page that will provide video only SERPS.

Google isn’t the only engine indexing videos, Bing has also integrated video results but does not seem to place as much weight on them and the primary results do not always come from YouTube.  (Google owns Youtube, so this is no surprise.)

YouTube – Youtube is the most popular way to search for video content on the web. While hard data is hard to come by, if YouTube were a search engine, it would only be behind Google in terms of search queries, which have been estimated between 3-4 billion a month.

Social Media – Social media is a quick way to spread a video.  Videos can become viral instantly when placed on Twitter or Facebook.  Much like content network ads, people are not “searching” for videos but instead have them thrust under their noses and, in the right context, watch and pass the video along to an even wider audience.  Social media won’t fit every type of video, and it’s important to note that not all videos need to be viral, many businesses can’t (and shouldn’t) produce videos with characteristics that commonly theme viral videos.   All videos should be made with the target market in mind, whether they will be viral or not is not necessarily relevant.

What Types of Video Files Can Be Crawled?

Google can crawl the following video file types: mpg, .mpeg, .mp4, .m4v, .mov, .wmv, .asf, .avi, .ra, .ram, .rm, .flv, .swf, so long as the files are accessible via HTTP. Metafiles requiring a download of the source via streaming protocols are not supported.

How To Optimize Videos

• Name your files accurately, using keyword rich names rather than the default code number that is automatically assigned by your camera.
• Using the same target terms as selected for the video, optimize the rest of the web page on which your video is hosted.
• Add a keyword rich title and description for the video, as you would (and should), the rest of the web page.  (This should be included in the sitemap, as will be shown below)
• Look for anchor text opportunities when spreading the video.  That is, when sharing the video with others, ask them to utilize keyword rich anchor text linking back to the video.
• Encode your video using multiple file types, so that it’s easier to download and spread!

Include Videos in Your Sitemap –

Steps to Manually Create a Sitemap:

1. Create a text file and save it with an .xml extension.
2. Add the following to the top of the file:

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>
<urlset xmlns=”http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9″>

1. Add the following to the bottom of the file:

</urlset>

1. Create an entry for each URL. The <loc> tag is required; the others are optional.

<url>     <loc>http://www.example.com/</loc>     <lastmod>2005-01-01</lastmod>     <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>     <priority>0.8</priority> </url>

1. Upload your Sitemap to your site.  The file should be located at www.domain.com/sitemap.xml

Google’s webmaster central states, “Video content includes web pages which embed video, URLs to players for video, or the URLs of raw video content hosted on your site.  If Google cannot discover video content at the URLs you provide, those records will be ignored by Googlebot.” As such, each video URL entry in the sitemap must contain:

• The Video Title
• A Short Description
• Play page URL
• Thumbnail URL
• Raw video file location and/or the player URL (SWF)

A Few Video Sitemap Tips

• Make sure that your robots.txt file isn’t blocking any of the items (including the play page URL, the video URL, and the thumbnail URL) included in each Sitemap entry.

• Make sure that the information in your <video:title> and <video:description> fields match your live site as Google will verify this.

• Each Sitemap or mRSS feed file that you provide must be under 10MB in size when uncompressed, and can contain no more than 50,000 video items.  If your uncompressed file is larger than 10MB, or you have more than 50,000 videos, you can submit multiple sitemaps and a sitemap index file.

For a description of video-specific tags, and more tips, check out the rest of Google’s tips for creating a video sitemap. For more information on optimizing videos, check out the Youtube help section.  If any of you have more video tips that you would like to share with the crowd, I would love to hear them!

But with all the online excitement and the exponential success of 2010’s web-based video advertising, it’s tempting to think that all you have to do is press record, press upload, press play, and then sit back to watch the traffic roll in.  Instead, remember that when making and posting videos, it is imperative that you actively optimize everything for maximum SEO potential.  It’s a simple equation: applying SEO basics + knowing your goals + doing it well = SEO video success.

Apply SEO basics

Intimidated by videos?  Don’t worry: videos respond to many of the same SEO practices that you have done before!  Videos, after all, are simply content, and must be presented to viewers and search engines as you would text.  The one large difference is that search engine bots can’t actually scan the video directly: instead, SEs rely on the content surrounding a video, the number and sources of inbound links, and its community engagement.  Therefore, with videos it’s especially important to

• Incorporate keywords into the title, surrounding text, and tags.
• Maximize your reach by posting on multiple hosting sites, and allowing for interaction such as comments, rating/voting, sharing, video responses, embedding, etc.
• Pursue links like you would for text articles.

But this is only a quick list: for more information, check out SEO Boy’s articles on the top 5 best practices for video SEO, optimizing for YouTube, optimizing for onsite videos, and optimize for third parties, link generation, and ranking.

Know your goals

A well-directed video can work magic for your website; an unfocused one will just take up time, space, and money.  So before you start production, lay out your goals.  Do you want to direct traffic to your website?  Develop brand awareness?  Grow your YouTube channel subscribers?  Choose an approach based on this goal, and make sure that the form of your video supports it the entire way.

One method of staying focused is to bookend your video with information.  In the first 5 seconds, the viewer should know who you are and how to find you; and at the end, you should include a call to action, such as “watch the next video,” “subscribe to our blog,” “visit our website,” etc.  If you’re using YouTube, you can help enable this action by inserting a video annotation with links to wherever you would like your viewers to go.

However, it is important to remember that viewers are leery of obvious advertisement.  For the most part, people watch television for its programming, not its commercials.  Internet marketers have it even harder in this sense, because while captive online advertising exists, viewers have a heightened ability to avoid it by only actively seeking out what they want to watch.  Therefore, even if you’re promoting a specific product, it’s important that your video is entertaining, original, and useful to the viewer, or otherwise they will click away, or not share the video with their friends.

Once you know your goals, set up a way to measure success.  Use analytics to see whether your traffic increased, or your subscribers went up directly after you released the video.  If you connected a video to a product or service, did you end up with more leads?  Being able to see if your video is working will help you know whether to keep exploring your current method, or to switch approaches.

Do it well

Lastly, but most importantly, it’s important that you do your video well.  Again, the record-upload-play model just won’t cut it: to be taken seriously, you need to make the best product you possibly can.  Try applying blogging/copy-writing principles to video editing:

• Watch out for typos – One way to kill a video is to make a straight-up mistake.  Do you have any signs of editing (visible templates, unfinished edges, etc.)?  Is someone standing in front of a window?  Does the sound cut-off?   Build enough time into your editing process so that you can get ready for the mistakes and complications that will inevitably occur.   And don’t forget to test everything before uploading!  There’s usually no way to pause or re-upload videos, so if a problem gets past you, you’ll have to delete your video and all of its historical information before you can start again. 
• Check your syntax – Just like you would pay attention to the grammar, flow, and syntax of a text blog, make sure your video makes sense.  Every scene should lead well into the next, and the editing should be clean.  This doesn’t mean things have to go slowly, or be mundane – keeping a video choppy but sensible is just as much of a challenge.
• Stay current – Before creating a video, see what others have done that is similar, and work from that.  Avoid fads and pre-packaged graphics, because most likely, by time you upload they’ve already been exhausted.  You also want to make sure you check your video properties so that they make use of your current player’s qualities (export in high-def, upload in a format that’s as close as possible to the original encoding, etc.).
• Use what you can – Not every company is going to have the highest quality of equipment.  That’s okay!  Use what you have creatively.  While good quality equipment and software is important, you can start from the ground up with great results. 
• Your form should always be tied to your content – A video is a video.  It’s not a text blog, it’s not a TV commercial, and it’s not a radio spot.  Videos are time-based, visual, and audio, and because it is natural for humans to invest more “truth” in what we see than what we hear or read, they are uniquely attention-grabbing.  Therefore, when writing your script, think of the best way you can get your message across.  A how-to?  An interview?  An interactive plot?  Video is a great place for exploration – if you see the opportunity to try something new, go for it.

Videos are an important part of SEO, and will be increasingly influential as boundaries are tested, broken, and forged.  By creating videos with these best practices in mind, you can join in the community that’s finding out just where videos can take online marketing.  But, of course, with video there’s more than one way to achieve success – what have you tried that’s worked out well?

First we need to understand HOW people find videos:

Search Engines – Google has placed more weight on video results than ever before, making it easier to find relevant videos without changing your searching habits. YouTube is owned by Google, making video results integration a natural process.

In addition to video results showing up organically, Google has also implemented a video specific search page that will provide video only SERPS.

Bing and Yahoo are also integrating video results into their algorythms but it does not appear that they are placing as much weight on them as Google, and, not surprisingly, the primary results are not coming from YouTube. On the same “Cute Cat” search, the Bing video results were positioned lower on the page and the videos themselves were sourced from sites like MSN Video and Metacafe. Yahoo showed minimal video results, and integrated them differently.

YouTube – Youtube has quickly become the most popular way to search for video content on the web. While hard data is hard to come by, if YouTube were a search engine, it would only be behind Google in terms of search queries, which have been estimated between 3-4 billion a month.

Social Media – Social can be the fastest way to spread a video. While people are generally not “searching” for videos via their social sites, you can’t help but see them constantly posted on your wall. My co-worker Rob did a quick scan of his Facebook wall and got 6 videos that have been posted by his friends in the past 17 hours.

And let’s not forget about the ease of sharing video links through twitter!

Other Video Sites (not YouTube)

• http://www.metacafe.com/
• http://vimeo.com/
• http://www.ustream.tv/
• http://www.hulu.com/

If you’re familiar at all with video, you will have heard about viral videos. There’s the classic rapping Southwest airlines flight attendant, and who can forget that adorable smelly monkey from way back when videos were first being spread around (you more than likely got this in an email!)?

So, what is a viral video?

A viral video is a video that gets shared via email, video sharing websites, social media, etc. When creating a video, if your hope is that it will go viral, you should consider the fact that they are often non-commercial and humorous, so applying these traits to your video will certainly enhance your chances of creating a viral video. So how do you think outside the box, and create a video that is a good use of your company’s time, but make it non-commercial?

Here are some slightly risky concepts:

• Controversy
• Scandals
• Sensationalism
• Conspiracy
• Taboo
• Dark Humour
• Shocking Material
• Patriotism

And here are some more “tame” options:

• Comedy
• Games
• Tools, Services & Information
• Artistic Content
• Top Ten Lists
• Collections
• Celebrities
• Patriotism (again)

Think you have that great idea that will surely go viral? That’s great! Bu you need to keep in mind that there are some best practices that should be followed to create buzz around your video:

• Don’t just make a video that seems good to YOU. Identify an audience with a high social networking potential and create messaging that appeals to them
• Make it easy to share/spread via a wide variety of media (and again consider the audience that you want to have spread it – where are they? Prioritize ease of sharing for them)
• If people become engaged with your video, engage them back to the extent that you can. For marketers, viral videos aren’t an accident, so you can make a plan in advance to handle feedback.
• Use your relationships and reputation to initiate the process (send it to people you know and who trust you to have good content)- make sure that you expose your content to influencers in the intended audience. If you don’t have relationships with well-networked influencers in your audience, you should work on networking and relationship building in addition to your viral content creation. Blogs, forums, email, social media sites are all places where you can find someone you’ve built a relationship with to view (and the possibly spread) your content.
• Don’t just send out a video.  Take the extra step and integrate the video into a video landing page.  This way, when your video goes viral, secondary and tertiary viewers are able to engage with your organization.  Surround the video with branding, messaging and key calls to action. http://blog.flimp.net/2010/03/video-cant-be-viral-video-at-launch.html

Mobile Consumption

The other thing to consider is the impact that increased mobile traffic will have on mobile consumption. The biggest change that could have happened to mobile video was the implementation of near-broadband speeds on most modern mobile phones. Bandwidth has always been an issue when it comes to streaming video but with 3g and recently launched 4g networks, the gap has been shortened considerably. Here are the primary factors to the increase in mobile video consumption:

• Modern Video Enabled Phones and Mobile Devices
• 3g and 4g network speeds
• Network and wifi integrated tablet PC’s
• Cost reduction for entry level smart phones
• Cost reduction in unlimited and high volume data plans
• Increased competition among mobile OS manufacturers (Apple iOS, Rim/Blackberry, Windows Mobile 7, Google Android)

All of these factors have contributed to a near doubling of smart phone usage over the past year. With all of those mobile video devices in the market place, consumption of videos has evolved.

The main challenge in harnessing all of this technology is that there is no standard video format for mobile viewing and the options for consumption are wide spread. The most obvious example being Apple’s snub to support Flash – making that a token differentiator between them and their competitors. Websites and companies who want to take advantage of Apple’s nearly 30% market share in Smartphones need to deliver their videos in a format other than Flash video.

Mobile devices also have app capability to make it easier for their users to find and consume videos. Many phones come with major apps, like YouTube, pre-installed. The advantages to using an app is that the technology is integrated so they should only produce results that are able to be viewed from your device. The disadvantage is that you are limited to the content contained within that particular service.

Because of the number of options out there, mobile video is only going to grow. The biggest take-away for creating advertising related videos is that you want to make them as accessible as possible. Use video hosting sites that are as focused as possible to your demographic but make sure they support all of the major mobile devices. If they have an app, even better. YouTube is the most universal at this time so that will always be a good place to start.

So now that you know where people find videos, and have some tips on how to make them viral worthy, have fun creating, and remember if you wouldn’t watch it, your target audience probably won’t either! Be sure to check in tomorrow when Jessica R gives us advice on how to optimize your videos for maximum results.

Why Video SEO?

Because! For many topic areas/keyword phrases, it’s much easier to appear on the search engine results page with a video result than with page of your website. Additionally, videos frequently have a higher click-through rate than normal organic listings.

In addition to multimedia search results being included in major search engine SERPs, the usefulness of actual video hosting-site search functions should not be underestimated. YouTube is technically the second most-used search engine behind Google, and the audience who understands that they can use YouTube to find how-to information and tutorials rather than solely entertainment is constantly expanding. If you can offer a video that teaches something both industry-related and useful, the impact in terms of branding can be much larger from an engaging video than via text ads or organic results. Additionally, competition for search results listings for the same terms are frequently much lower for video than for other organic listings: there just aren’t as many videos yet competing for a certain niche keyword as there are web pages.

Now that we understand that the creation and optimization of videos might be a viable branding and traffic-development strategy for your website, the next steps are important. How do you “do video right” in order to maximize your chances of being discovered and making the big time? There are a few important things to keep in mind:

1. Choose an interesting, unique, relevant topic- Ah, that’s always the rub, isn’t it? Make it entertaining and differentiate yourself, but hey you’ve still gotta provide something useful to watchers. In most cases you won’t get to make random unique videos on just any topic. In order to make a video make sense for your business, you have to keep it industry-relevant or related But that doesn’t mean you can’t get creative and deliver a message in a different way, so keep in mind that unique and different DO count in terms of “shareability” and in terms of the time people will dedicate to watching your videos.
2. Use a descriptive title- Funny titles are…funny, but they usually don’t give Google or searchers any help in understanding the content of your video. Especially because a video search result won’t contain any snippet of text like the meta data associated with a web page search result, you need to make sure the title describes what someone will find there. Use whatever keywords you’d like people to find the video with. You can target keywords in your video’s title in the same way that you can target them on your website, so either keep in mind that you should keep them consistent with the keywords on the page on which the video is embedded, or do a little research to determine the video-specific competitive landscape for a keyword before you title the video. Using YouTube’s keyword tool will allow you to determine dedicated video-only search volume for keywords, and then you can use the number of competing videos which appear for your terms on Google Video or YouTube to determine the relative competition for each term. If you are hosting your video at a site like YouTube, tag your video accurately and take advantage of the video description and captioning capabilities YouTube offers to expand upon its content.
3. Embed your video- It’s better to embed your videos on your pages than link to them. Links get broken, locations get changed- and it will be sad when your excellent video inclusion no longer can be played because it was relocated or removed.
4. Create a thumbnail- If you create a useful, descriptive thumbnail image for your video rather than letting the thumbnail be a random image from the video, it will be more likely to catch a searcher’s eye and interest.
5. Add a video sitemap- You can either add video information to your sitemap, or create a separate video sitemap to direct search engines to the video content you’d like indexed. If you don’t know how, you can read Google’s video sitemap advice. Don’t forget to submit (or resubmit) your sitemap once video is integrated.
6. Leverage video analytics- If you really want to understand how people are interacting with your videos, you need to have some sort of analytics to give you that visibility. Unfortunately this issue can become complicated by several factors, including where you host your video. If you host your own video on your site (an option which gives you the most control but isn’t financially feasible for many, particularly if you have a large number of videos or high video traffic), you can track user interaction with the video and your site using Google Analytics’ Event Tracking. You can find out when people stop watching, their actions before and after watching the video, and how they got to your website in the first place.  If you customize the video player on your site for an embedded video hosted elsewhere you can still gain Analytics data, but this is a bit more complicated and you’d better have a competent programmer on staff to implement. For videos hosted on YouTube, you can use YouTube Insight to gain some understanding of who is watching your videos and where they’re coming from, but if you use Google Analytics to track other site use metrics, you’ll probably be a bit disappointed by the feature set currently available, as it won’t give you as much data as you’d like to fully understand visitor actions before or after they interact with the video, and no metrics regarding how engaged they are with the video itself. If you have videos hosted elsewhere, or on multiple sites, using an analytics package such as that offered by TubeMogul can help you gain a greater understanding of your traffic quality by video and by platform.  Overall, the best choice for you will depend on your video requirements, visitor volume, and budget, but no matter what, to get the most usefulness from your video SEO efforts, you need to make sure you can track whatever you do.

In summary- if you have videos, fix them up and start leveraging them! If you don’t have any videos, consider what areas of your business might be translated to the format and step into the arena. Interactive, engaging multimedia search is part of the future of SEO, and you need to be there with it. Once again many thanks to Rand and the SEOMoz team for their great image and video SEO tips at their Pro Conference- for more fabulous ideas for creating an overall online video strategy, check out these tips from SEOMoz team member Kate Matsudaira!

But to be honest, the type of video SEO project I truly enjoyed getting into was getting videos to index under our own top-level domains. Especially because it was so new and so few were actually setting up their stuff to be found in search engines that it became quite the race – as mentioned in the last post.

How to get videos to index in Google under your top level domain

There are two principles you have to remember :

1) One URL; one page – a standard SEO law. It’s the other one that’s a little pricy.

2) CDN – You’re going to need a CDN (Content Distribution Network) that will allow you to make permalinks that act as subpage on the TLD. This goes for videos as well. You’ll have to give a page for each video. For example:  if you have a video in the “yoururl.com/about-us” page and you want to index it, the video will need its own separate page such as “yoururl.com/about-us/video” or “.com/video/name-of-video.” If you try to claim the index page on your site and the video on the index page as well, the duplicate content filter will remove one.

Once your servers have these assets, then all you need is a 120x90px image of the video and you’re ready to begin making an xml video sitemap.

Parameters for a video XML Sitemap for Google

Whereas the regular Video XML sitemap for Google is easy to make and, if you have a static site, there’s a questionable need for the sitemap, Video sitemaps are of the utmost important. Since Googlebot can’t read the contents of the video (still), your sitemap has to fill in the gaps.

Google Video XML Sitemap Parameters include:

• Title
• Description
• Keywords
• (sound familiar?)
• Tags
• Category
• Content Location
• Video Location
• Publication Date
• Video Duration (length)

Once you create the video, make sure to upload it to your site and submit the path to your Google Webmaster account. And if you don’t have a Google Webmaster account, now would be a good time to get one.

For a template from which you can create your own Google Video XML Sitemap, check out the Google support section.

Were you able to index videos from your own sites? Let us know.

Most of the sites I had under my control had their own video commercials that were integral parts of the user experience (if you could call it that). And before I knew it, the project became a race against competitors.

Now there are two types of Video SEO:

1. YouTube Optimization
2. SEO Optimization for the website

The first I’ll talk about is YouTube Optimization

A lot of common sense SEO Here. The best resource I found on this was from Reel SEO. Working for memory, here are some of the tips and tricks I use as a result of testing and some of the advice from Reel SEO.

1) You’ve done this type of onsite SEO before – Google will be the first one to tell you that the indexing principles in YouTube are the same as in indexing in the standard Google search engine.
2) Titles are that important – You’ve got little space in those titles, and like its older brother, those titles are important for targeting.
3) Description principles -The first principle is to put the full path URL in the beginning of the description. It helps with the CTA and makes it easier for the searcher to find your site and learn more about you. The second principle is to make use of the description space. If you have the transcript of the video, use it. But if you don’t, take the extra time to write a keyword rich description. And for the last principle: if there is more than one video in the series, link to the proceeding and preceding videos at the end of the description.
3) Tags work quite well – Remember when keywords were essential in indexing? Well, they still have an impact in the YouTube search engine.
4) Treat the video pages as pieces of content – ever seen a disparity in PageRank between videos? That’s because backlinks and trafficked videos can have a significant impact in rankings. 1 page; 1 URL. The same SEO principles apply. You can treat YouTube a user account like a website and the videos as pages of content.

Using these technique helped our websites get a significant boost in traffic. Of course, most of the videos also had significant TV push. But with some SEO, your videos can start ranking in Google searches (and YouTube searches).

This was the easy one of the two projects. Next week I’ll start to talk about the testing done with Video SEO Optimization on websites.

So you work for a company who’s in tune with SEO. Overall the company is making great strides in social marketing, by keeping up with the latest hype and trends. They even have a YouTube channel filled with interesting, relevant videos but the results just aren’t there. Below are some additional optimizations, which can provide a nice traffic bump, so give them a shot. Also be sure to check out our Top 5 Best Practices for Video SEO, for a little background.

1. Try hosting everywhere.  First there’s deciding where your videos will live: on a 3^rd party site or on your own. I say both, they’re different monsters! Hosting the videos on your website is usually the approach taken when trying to add as much value as possible to a single site, be it clicks, time on site or achieving a sale. Most organizations try 3^rd party when they want to gain as much exposure as possible for their video, focusing on brand awareness. There’s the chance that your videos will sit on your website and gain hardly any exposure and also the chance that someone will watch your video on YouTube and won’t quite make it over to your product page. These scenarios are sad- so give it a shot, try casting a really large net and gain as much traffic as possible.

2. Optimization Checklist. Make sure you have a video transcript, good title tags and maybe even leave a comment or two about the video! Posting comments will show even further, that you like engaging your customers. If you don’t have a transcript, the search engines will know little of your video except what’s in the title tags. You might even try optimizing the transcript so it flows smoothly and can be read easily. Having a fun, catchy title for your video is also important, though be sure to include your keywords. Remember you’re selling the video and someone is making a 5 second decision on whether to watch it or not… try using the same headline-writing skills you apply to your other marketing projects!

3. Short and to the point. Engage your customers but make your point and move on. Definitely shoot for a video which is 2 – 3 minutes long, but at the very most 5 minutes. Free time is a luxury, don’t impede. Also think about why most searchers are watching a video – to be entertained or learn something new! This isn’t TV, so try not to make an infomercial, unless it’s kitschy and fun. If the video doesn’t provide some benefit to your customers, scrap it.

4. Apply PPC Principles To Your Video. PPC ads are all about testing- trying different headlines, descriptions and even landing pages. Try applying this principle to your videos by breaking out everything you can into a moveable element and make several different combinations of videos. Many see the creation of one video as a big enough step- but if you put just a bit more effort into making your video modifiable up front, your likelihood of striking a successful balance will increase, and with it, the value of your video project. Different advantages and calls to action can resonate with several types of users, try them all.

5. Submit An XML Sitemap. If you have a video on your website, regardless of where it’s hosted, Google will usually only know about it if you tell them. Here are some instructions for creating your sitemap. This is the one item which could be your golden ticket. If Google hasn’t found your videos yet it will be like flipping a switch on and pretty soon your videos should start showing up in search results.

Video SEO can be very tricky and as with all SEO, coming up with content that will resonate with your audience is the key to success. Simply being out there and trying the latest trends isn’t necessarily enough. So try something new and see if it works, the tips above should be a good starting point!

Depending on the objectives of you SEO campaign, there are several answers to the above questions. This post is going to zero in on the best hosting solution based on your SEO campaign objectives— in-house versus 3^rd party hosting sites.

Your first step in determining where to host your video is to define your objectives. Whether link generation, branding, maximum viewership, or better organic rankings, a clearly defined objective will help guide your SEO video strategy.

In-House Video Hosting

Link Generation: Videos have the potential to earn a lot of links and link juice. If the purpose of your video is to increase inbound links to your site, then it is best to host the video on your own website.

To get the most out of inbound links, provide an embeddable video option on your site, which will visitors to easily embed the video into their site, blog, or social profiles. Make sure you optimize the anchor text in this link to include the keywords for that page. Each video that is embedded will act as a link back to your site, with keyword rich anchor text.

Improved Rankings: Improved ranking goes hand-in-hand with link generation. A good video can and will attract a high number of quality links, which will in turn increase organic rankings.If your campaign objective is to improve the rankings for your site, then consider hosting the video in-house. This will allow your site to take credit for the inbound links. See Link Generation above for some best practices to optimize inbound links.

Another bonus to onsite hosting, you have more control over the content that lives around your video. This includes branding, internal links, images and additional content. Just make sure that you video title and other page content is optimized for keywords!

3^rd Party Hosting

Maximum Viewership: To maximize video views, your video needs to be hosted where the volume is— 3^rd party hosting sites like YouTube, Revver and Vimeo.

Just because you host your video on a 3^rd party site does not mean it will be viewed. Your video’s success relies on the content, titles, and social media aspects. Once you have created your engaging video, pay careful attention to the title. Videos are watched based on the title. In the case of maximizing viewers, it is better the grab the viewer with a catchy title over incorporating keywords.

Don’t discount the power of social media. This is the piece of the puzzle that will enable your video to go viral. Allow visitors to easily embed or share the video via email or on other social media sites like Twitter, Digg, StumbleUpon and Delicious.

Branding: The most effective medium for a video branding campaign is the 3^rd party hosting sites— they are best for high traffic and pageviews. For the campaign to be effective, make sure your company logo is prominent on the first and last frame of the video. This way it is the first and last thing views see. The logo should also by on every frame. Make it easy for viewers to explore you brand further. The video should also include a call to action and your website should be easily clicked in your profile.

While this post focused on the best hosting strategy based on your campaign objectives, there are key best practices for SEO video optimization. So once you determine the best medium of distribution, don’t forget to focus on the nuts and bolts of video optimization.

Best Practice #1: Optimize video for keywords or key phrases.

Even though Google has evolved to include videos in SERPs, it still cannot read and index video content. However, there are some things you need to do to help search engines properly index and rank your video content.

1. Include a keyword or key phrase in the title. This isn’t a must-do for your video. If you want a video to rank for a specific search query, you should consider it to improve chances of ranking. For other options for the video title, see Best Practice #2.
2. Provide a detailed description. Start with your transcript and revise to make it reader-friendly. Don’t forget to include your keywords!
3. Tag with important key phrases. Most video hosting websites allow you to include up to 20 key phrases to tag your video. This is a simple (and often overlooked) step to include target keywords for your video. The tagged keywords should still be relevant to the actual video content.

Think of the video title and description as your meta data. Make sure to include this for every video and optimize them with priority keywords.

Best Practice #2: Attract and maintain viewers.

Give searchers a reason to click on your video, and make sure they watch it in its entirety. With over 16.8 billion videos online, your title and content needs to scream above noise.

1. Give it a catchy title. If your goal for the video is pageviews (and not necessarily keyword rankings), then choose a catchy, inciting title to attract clicks. Just like for other media and advertising vehicles, include attention-getting headlines that encourage searchers to watch your video over another.
2. Keep it short. Unless you are posting the latest episode of Lost on Hulu.com, typically surfers will not watch a video that is over 5 minutes in length, unless the video content is not highly relevant and engaging.

Best Practice #3: Maximize viewership.

One of the best strategies to increase pageviews for a video is to let it spread by viewers. It’s important to make it for viewers to share your video. Each of these video settings will encourage sharing and help increase pageviews.

1. Email to a friend. Allow viewers to easily email the video to a friend.
2. Tweet please! Give viewers an option to Tweet. Include a temple Tweet and don’t forget to use the bit.ly URL shortener to track success.
3. Enable embeddable links. This further encourages viewers to spread the word by making it easy for them to embed the video in their website or blog.
4. Allow user ratings. Most searchers gravitate to content that has high reviews from peers. High-ranked videos tend to be saved by users and shared amongst colleagues and friends. So assuming that you only post quality video content, your video’s 5-star rankings will attract more pageviews.

Best Practice #4: Give credit (and links) where it is due.

Take advantage of branding and site links for all of your videos. Don’t miss a prime opportunity to associate video content to your brand, and also guide users to your site where they can learn more and potentially convert into revenue or a lead.

1. Include branding. Videos are a great branding vehicle to build trust and an image with customers. Include your company’s logo on the video (and on your profile/channel) to reinforce your brand and increase awareness.
2. Link to your own site. Use videos as a website portal to increase website traffic, sales or leads. Make it easy for users to get to your site to learn more. Include a website link on your profile and in the video description to drive traffic to your site.

Best Practice #5: Upload to relevant video sharing websites.

Start spreading you video on relevant video sharing websites. Many of the sites listed below offer free accounts, and all of them allow you to create a profile and/or channel for your company to host the videos.

1. YouTube
2. Revver
3. HowCast
4. Vimeo
5. Blip.tv
6. Daily Motion
7. Y! Videos
8. More video websites…

With these five best practices you will have the tools to evolve your SEO campaign with Google Universal Search. However, it is important to consider the videos content and the target when before deciding to optimize and post a video. Don’t just post a video for sake of posting. Make sure the content is relevant and targeted to your audience.