Video SEO

I get a lot of people calling me asking about doing a single video to use on their website.  They want a good "About Us" video or bio video to be viewed once people come to their page.  Well, having one video purposed on your homepage gets you on the right track, but by using only one video, you're organization is missing out on some tremendous opportunities.  Using a multiple video approach within your web presence is a far superior way of engaging your target audiences.  There are many reasons why this is so, but I want to give you five big reasons why using multiple videos will pay off far more than just a single video on your website.





1) Gives a more intimate/ in depth look into your organization:

Ask any president, CEO, marketing gal or average Joe what separates their company from the competition.  What responses do you typically hear?  Our people.  Our customer service.  Our innovative products and services.  

Blah, blah, blah.

Everyone preaches this same message.  Even if it's true, how are you proving it?  

A video on your homepage?  Well that's a great start, but let me ask you this:

Can you adequately share your story with one video?

Of course you can't.  It's much like meeting someone for the first time at a networking event and chatting to them for 2 minutes.  You certainly get a general impression of that person, but you will never leave that conversation saying, "Wow, I can really identify that guy's distinguishing qualities."

Multiple videos help you have an intimate conversation with your audience, which will inevitably separate your organization from your competition.

RJE Knoll, a business furniture distributer in Indianapolis, greatly benefited from this approach.  After doing a video series on their people, their revenue increased 22% and their email open rates increased 50%

2) Makes your website dynamic:

More and more people are coming to your website to learn about you.  Your website is the hub of all of your marketing efforts.  If you're smart, you would constantly find new ways to keep people coming back to your site over and over again; to see your call to actions and to be perpetually impressed by your company.  Companies today pay big bucks to attract new people and existing clientele to their website.

What reason are you giving your audiences to keep coming back to your site? 

With multiple video stories, new and old audiences alike will continually peak their head in to see your fresh new content.

3) Ability to touch diverse audiences:

I bet your company has multiple products and/or services, doesn't it?  I'd also bet you have different audiences to speak to (clients, vendors, resellers, end users, employees, etc.), don't you?  Well, do you honestly think a single video will be applicable to all of your audiences and adequately highlight your products and services?  You're crazy if you do!

Multiple videos enable you to have the right conversations with the right people.  Why make a single video with a generic message, when you can have multiple videos that touch every possible angle in detail?

4)  Helps fill sales cycle gap:

Ever wonder what to do after you make a sales proposal, and you get the "This is exactly what we need, but we need to hold off for a year," response?  Do you call them every once in a while?  Do you send them emails?  Snail mail?  What's the best way to stay connected throughout their sales cycle?  

Answer:  Send them multiple video stories.

It's a great passive way of staying sticky, all while solidifying why your organization is the best.

5)  Enhances search engine optimization efforts:

Forrester recently reported that by having video on your website, your chances of showing up on the first page of a Google search increases 50x.  The more video content you have circulating on your website, the more it improves your SEO initiatives.

With VideoHere, Net Atlanitc, Inc. offers users the ability to seamlessly utilize video in their email campaigns, creating a highly relevant and engaging marketing message.

“Adding video to email campaigns will improve lead quality and increase conversions for our customers,” says Bill Reich, President of Net Atlantic. “Studies show that video email campaigns increase click-through rates by 2 to 3 times, shortening the sales cycle and increasing revenues.”

An added advantage of VideoHere is that an online marketer is able to enhance their SEO efforts and increase their social media footprint with video content. The feature includes an out of the box tool that tags the video for search engines, and the video player has features to allow the viewer to easily share the videos with their network.

Read the full press release of Net Atlantic's integration with VideoHere.

Wondering how you can video enable your marketing software offering? Get started with VideoHere today!

Based on client feedback, we're excited to announce new sharing options within the Backlight video player.  Viewers are now able to easily post your videos to Twitter, Facebook, and a few popular social bookmarking websites.

SEO Impact: Since video sharing impacts video SEO, these new player enhancements further enhance how Backlight boosts your SEO efforts.  If you haven't already, make sure to check out our new white paper focused on video SEO.



There's no need to change any settings within Backlight to take advantage of the new features.  As long as you've had "sharing options" turned on for your videos, your viewers will see the new sharing options.



You'll also notice the menu button is gone and the new share menu option is overlayed on top of the video (and the options go away while watching the video unless someone moves their mouse over the player).  This player release also included polishing up the look-and-feel and fixing a few bugs.

We always invite your feedback.  If you have any questions or problems, please contact us.

As our clients look to expand interactive marketing efforts and increase video seo, we have had many requests from people looking to add a Backlight layout to a blog post.  Unfortunately, most blogging applications do not accept the standard JavaScript embed code for a layout becasue they view it as a potentially malicious threat.  You can easily workaround this issue with the use of an iframe html tag as defined by the following steps:

1. Type your blog post and insert a reference to where you would like your layout to appear
2. Switch to the HTML or Source view of your posting
3. Replace your placeholder with an iframe tag
4. Set the appropriate attributes for the iframe
   
   • src - set this value to the Backlight link for your layout, which can be found via the Link button on the main layout page
   • frameborder - set this value to 0 to seemlessly integrate the iframe into your page
   • height - set this value to a numerical value of the height of your layout in pixels
   • width - set this value to a numerical value of the width of your layout

As noted above, you will want to set the height/width attributes based on the size of your layout to avoid scroll bars.  While you are working to resize the iframe, you may want to set the frameborder value to 1 for a visual reference to the size of the iframe relative to the video llayout.  It may take a few attempts to get your desired result, but with some trial and error, you will have a nice video layout within your blog post as demonstrated below.

I've talked about video search engine optimization many times before, but one question that keeps coming up is does where I get my online video hosting affect my search engine optimization?

Our stance right now (and it's always subject to change since Google is in a constant state of flux, always trying to improve its service), is it does not matter where your video is hosted. It is not necessary to host your video on your own servers or even on your own domain to get the authority credit for your domain or to get your video to show up in Google's universal search.

Additionally, there are big advantages to not hosting your video yourself, like the ability to utilize a Content Delivery Network (CDN) which ensures an optimal viewing experience.

This is one of the tips that Mark Robertson, the Founder of ReelSEO a blog about "video search optimization, online video marketing, internet video advertising, and everything else related to online video" gives to his readers. He gives 9 other tips in a recent post titled "Web Video Marketing - 10 Common Marketing Mistakes" that I recommend all my readers check out. (Note: You'll see some back and forth comments I had with Mark about the subject of this post)

Josh Bernoff, a researcher at Forrester called buyers in the business-to-business sector "one of the most active groups (he's) ever seen when it comes to social participation." He goes on to say, "If you're a B2B marketer and you're not using social technologies in your marketing, it means you're late."

Twitmatic, is a real-time, online video search engine that looks exclusively for tweets that contain videos. This isn't just another video hosting service, Twitmatic actually allows users to scan the Twitter public timeline in real-time and find videos that were tweeted about even seconds before. Why should you care? Because this represents yet another way to distribute your videos to a receptive audience in yet another case of permission marketing.

A few of Twitmatic's features:

• Search functionality whereby you can search up to 3 terms
• In the sidebar, you can now perform a number of different functions, including:
  • Choosing list view vs. video view (seen above)
  • View twitter trends and can click on these to see video results that match.
  • View all videos being shared on Twitter in a real-time timeline
• Follow or unfollow twitter users, reply to tweets, view tweets from the associated user, and bookmark favorite videos
• If you sign in as a user, your searches will be saved automatically.
• If you perform a search that returns no matches, once they are found, they will appear on your saved searches

How does Twitmatic know your tweet contains a video?
It's not just searching for the word video. It's actually more sophisticated than that. Below is a answer given by Greg, one of the co-founders of Twitmatic.

"Some of the technology I can’t get into but basically we are able to take a tweet, find an http url in it, and then process the web content at the other end of the url. The process then pulls out likely videos and pushes them into our system. There are current limitations to our technology due to certain sites disabling embedding or utilizing advanced flash techniques.  We parse the public timeline as well as do specific general searches to find many of the videos. We also depend on user searches to bring in other videos."

This is good to know because we can continue to use link shortening software like bit.ly to continue and track the number of clicks on our links.

What does this mean for you?
Along with the video SEO that you are currently targeting for Google, Twitmatic is another channel for users to find your video without you really having to do anything other than share your videos through Twitter.

Does this really work?
Here is a look at the Twitmatic interface after I searched for Vontoo who is a current Cantaloupe client that had a couple of people share their video via Twitter.




Best results?
If you already have a Twitter account, make it a habit of tweeting links to your online marketing videos. If you already have a whole library of videos ready to share, it mike make sense to start dripping out tweets to links to those videos.

You'll also want to give a lot of consideration to what "keywords" you put in the tweet. Twitmatic is so new that we can't give you definitive advice here, but we'll continue to experiment and let you know.

It took less than a week for two of our videos from our video newsletter to rise to #2 and #3 in Google's video search for "Indianapolis video production"

Check it out for yourself.

I have to find out if our clients are having the same results or if they're even getting the full use out of Backlight and it's video SEO capabilities. As a video management system, it's such an easy tool to use and it's the perfect answer for so many internet marketers who are trying to figure out how to use video online.

("Backlight Tip" and "Clarian" are ours and the cool thing is if you click through to the actual video, it leads you to our blog)

In this video:

• How to choose video seo keywords
• 5 keyword categories every video marketer should consider
• Time saving practices when using Backlight, Cantaloupe's online video platform

As a runner, I don't think I've ever seen a more inspirational advertising campaign than the New Balance LOVE/Hate. I think it has something to do with the subtlety of the inspiration and their ability to make tangible the psychology of running.

Instead of showing blood, sweat, and tears or flashing up words like "pride" and "toughness" and "win" they show runners going through the psychological hurdles we all go through, like the challenge of leaving the comfort of your bed to train, or the fact that the first mile alway seems like the hardest.

I caught one of these traditional video marketing pieces (ahem...tv commercials) and wanted to share it with a friend. I searched on Google. No luck. I did a Google video search. No luck. (well, I got some YouTube results but they were poor quality) I went to New Balance's website. Still nothing, but they did lead me to their Facebook page...

There they are!

New Balance has done a great job using their facebook page to distribute online video, but they could be doing a better job with video search engine optimization. At Cantaloupe, we think Facebook is a great way to get some extra eyeballs (we're starting to see quite a few leads for our own business come through our facebook page) but we're still more optimistic about the power of video search.

The key to both video search and distributing video on facebook, or any other social networking site, is having a tool that makes it quick and easy to convert video online, manage it, embed it, and distribute everywhere you market. If you haven't seen it yet, Backlight is a tool to help you do just that.

I think you do. And if I'm wrong, tell me in the comments section. I'll approve it.

The reason I ask is because eMarketer says "Most of their (B2B Marketers') targets—businesspeople—don’t have audio turned on in the office. Talking heads or voiceovers that no one hears are not very effective."

I wish they had evidence to support that most businesspeople don't have audio turned on, but I think they assume it's an unquestionable fact. Of course company-issued computers don't come with speakers or have audio that can be turned on. Why would they let you have such a distraction?

I don't have evidence to the contrary, but does anyone else find that hard to believe? I would expect most SMB's to not bother regulating audio, and even if most people thought it prudent to regulate themselves and turn off audio, they'd still have the option to turn it on to watch an online video.

SMB's make up a larger part of the market, but I even wonder how many large companies don't allow audio. Can anyone speak from experience?

In any case, the feature discussed in the article - online video subtitles - is actually quite useful, but I think more so for video search engine optimization (Video SEO) than for accomodating users without audio. (although the statistics they present about increase in average video completion rates are quite convincing)

We haven't yet added captions to Backlight, Cantaloupe.tv's own online video platform, but it's high on our list. We may preach about using streaming video instead of text on your website, but we can't deny that the two play together well.

Reel SEO is a blog site that provides the most insightful, interesting, and useful information out there about video search engine optimization. Recently, they decided to make it easy to find all of their most popular posts on Video SEO tips and techniques.

One of these posts lists the top video search sites. I thought it'd be helpful to spread this information to all my readers. You can see the full list here, but below is a list of the top video search sites by Alexa rank:

1. Yahoo Video
2. Google Video
3. Windows Live Video
4. MSN Video
5. AOL Video

Do you need a video management system that makes it easy to push your video to all these search sites? Then check out Backlight 2.0, a platform for managing all of your online video content.

Don't take it from me, take it from Nate Elliot, a research expert at Forrester. His specific claim is that indexed video is 50 times more likely to rank on the first page of Google than textual results.

Is it true? Well I recommend taking a look at this post from Reel SEO that digs even deeper into the study. For those of you interested in the quick takeway - Reel SEO basically says that there are a lot of factors and not every video is 50x more likely, but these results are still very telling of video's increasing significance among search engine results.

If you take a quick gut check, these findings make sense. Video search engine optimization is such a new concept so there is a lot of "green space" out there right now. It's like pioneer America where land is up for grabs simply because no one has come along to claim it yet.

This won't always be the case. Online video search will mature also, but why not take advantage of this while this unique opportunity still exists?

Wonder how? Contact Cantaloupe.TV today to learn about our upcoming release of our online video management system Backlight 2.0. (UPDATED 4/12/09: Backlight is here now! Visit our website to request a demo and learn more.)

What the heck am I talking about? Well, there's a new vocabulary forming around SEO, and particularly internet video SEO, and I finally have a clearer picture (literally) of key distinctions between types of "universal search" results.

For a long time now, I've heard and thus repeated, that when a video thumbnail shows up as part of a regular google search, it's referred to as "Universal Search." I now know there are two types: Blended Universal and Universal One-Box

The easiest way to tell the difference is to refer to these pictures:

Example of "Blended Universal Result" for "Laughter Yoga"


Example of "Universal One-Box Result" for "Short Video"


Hopefully this helps you better understand how videos show up in Google's standard search. While both results are a huge accomplisment for any organization trying to optimize its video for search, in my opinon, the "Universal Blended" result will be more highly regarded by searchers. It has the appearance of a more organic search result and suggests more relevant content.

But that's just my opinion...

In case you missed it, Cantaloupe sent another installment of its Cantaseries Video Magazine earlier this week. (Cantaseries is our ongoing web video marketing series where we feature an interesting, heartfelt, inspiring or just otherwise entertaining story. We use it to keep in touch with clients and other Cantaloupe fans.) 

This latest web video story was called "Laughter Yoga." I won't waste any time telling what that is, because the video itself is worth a million...laughs?. 

I have to say, it's a behemoth at over 7 minutes. Sounds crazy considering how often we preach shorter content for the internet, but more of the results on that in another post.

Basically, I wanted to share with you something else cool we saw yesterday. We sent "Laughter Yoga" out through our latest release of our online video management system Backlight 2.0.

One feature we've been very focused on is video search engine optimization. Our goal is for our clients to know that when they upload a video and embed it using our system, that they're taking advantage of the best practices in Video SEO.

Yesterday, we saw a small part of that in action with Laughter Yoga. It's a small confirmation, but if you go to Google's video search and type in "Cantaloupe Yoga" you get the following result: 



We're probably not going to convert a lot of people with the search term "Cantaloupe Yoga" but it's a start. Another cool thing is that our ads, or calls to actions" if you well, stay within the video (check out the 0:56 mark and the 5:35 mark) so if people find us there we can direct them what to do next.

This is all very exciting for us here at Cantaloupe. We're looking forward to bringing this online marketing practice to all current and future clients.

In the recent months, more and more companies have begun utilizing contextual web video to enhance in their interactive marketing activities.  One company that does this extremely well is ESPN as demonstrated by the following page: Lewis, Ball St. beat W. Michigan to complete 12-0 regular season.  In this page, the video highlights have been embedded inline with the game recap article, which as we noted last time provides context for search engines and promotes the visibility of the video itself. 


Look for this contextual strategy to increase as firms begin to realize the power of online video and its association with good web search engine optimization practices.

My mind never sleeps when it comes to thinking about the the value of internet video marketing and it's place in the countless online marketing tools today's marketers have available to them.

Whether you consider blogs, email marketing, SEO, online advertising, streaming video, social networks, or even Twitter just to name a few, marketers have innumerable options - and that's just online.

So when one takes a step back and really considers why he/she should use video marketing, he/she has to ask, what can video do for me online that nothing else can?

Rather than embark on a tiresome bullet point list, I'm just going to give you one today.

Video finally brings the notion of "our people are our product" to the internet age.

What do I mean? Well it's as simple as thinking about buying clothing online. Would you ever consider buying a pair of shoes online without first seeing a picture of them?

Of course not and online retailers like Zappos.com know this, which is why they offer not only one picture, but at least 8 different views, including a bottom side view.

Let's say you're firm is a consultancy, or a law firm, or an agency, or any other service firm where the primary thing being sold is the knowledge, helpfulness, and skills of people. Then, what would it mean to show the bottom side view of your product?

I can promise you one thing. It'd be difficult, if not impossible, to demonstrate all views of your people-based product with just pictures. Unlike shoes, people have expressions, they have tone of voice, and they have gestures. All of these are critical attributes about your product.

So if you say people are your product, have you brought your product to the internet age with streaming video on your website?

You've spent time, effort, energy and money in the form of SEO, websites, sales people, traditional marketing, etc. The folks that put this stuff together for you said "they are paying us a lot of money so we better make our communication bright and shiny so that we can really create a stir and turn some heads!"

Perfect. Now what?

Now that we have the proper attention from the proper folks, what do we do to keep those new leads and prospects in our communication loop until they sign on the dotted line? Because most of our sales cycles are much longer than one touch it might make sense to think about a way to use valuable - devalued and disposable - content as a way to reach out again and again and again to these new prospects until they are ready to give us money.

I don't know about you but most of my effort goes into just getting someone to listen to me the first time. Once I have them I certainly don't want to lose them so I use our ongoing video story series as a way to reach out with a big "shepherd's hook," grab them and bring them back to me for... well, as long as it takes.

Interestingly, I had a gentleman call me up 12 months after the first time I talked to him about our ongoing Video Magazine program. Now... he was ready to hire us because he needed 12 months to get through his hurdles.

Because Cantaloupe sent him a new story every four weeks or so, we ultimately, had a reason to keep him in a long-term conversation that lasted throughout his sales cycle.

Otherwise, 12 months later who knows what other Video Magazine company might be in front of him when he's ready to buy.

If you check out my previous posts on what's going on with video search engine optimization at Cantaloupe, I talked about what we currently do as well as what we currently don't do and don't plan on doing.

Certainly there are a few things we don't do and plan on doing, right? Well here are some of them:

What we're currently developing...

1. Clean and informative URLs. The URL can play a significant role in overall search rank and including descriptive terms in your URL can have a huge payoff. For example http://yourvideomagazine.com/?itemID=9854 is not as descriptive as http://yourvideomagazine.com/story_title.html
2. Video sitemaps. There is a large movement right now to increase video search engine optimization through video specific sitemaps. We agree it is a good thing and are fully testing this new search engine advancement.
3. FLV metadata for online video specific search engines. Although Google controls the search market, we are currently researching the benefit of optimizing for other niche search engines.

(For this series of posts on search engine marketing at Cantaloupe I want to thank Dan McFadden and Dusty Koekenberg for helping to provide content)

In a previous post I talked about what we do for video search engine optimization. I mentioned a document which I've decided to  publish here in parts.

What we do...

1. We link to your Video Magazine from the “Video Magazines” page on our website. The more websites that link to your Video Magazine, the more search engines love it
2. We build your Video Magazine to comply with current web standards. When the page is semantically correct it’s easier for search engines to index it.
3. Provide an accurate description of the video in the meta-data and titles of the page
4. Insert H1 header tags with relevant page and video descriptions. This is what a searcher sees when your page comes up in Google. This is just as important as page titles if not more in determining what a searcher clicks on.
5. Include descriptive headlines and text about the video in close proximity to the actual video tag. Since search engines cannot read the actual raw video file, they use the text around it to validate the video content. 
6. Utilize CSS image replacement. For example, if the image is supposed to read "Your Company's Video Magazine" we use actual text with a background image so that you get the SEO benefit 
7. Put alt tags on all images. These do not directly increase your PageRank, but they do help with navigating your site, and the easier your site is to use, the more people that will use it, and the better your site will rank.