VIDEO SEO
THE “REEL” STORY ON GETTING
YOUR ONLINE VIDEO DISCOVERED

Video Search - Background

Video Search Engine Indexing

Video Search Engine Indexing Methods
Video Search Engine Indices Largely Text Based
– In File Metadata – Filename, etc..
– Surrounding page text
– Social tagging
– Closed captions
– Transcripts, Etc…
Advanced Video Analysis Technologies
– Automatic speech to text recognition (ASR)
– Optical character recognition (OCR) – scene text
– Object recognition & concept detection
– Facial recognition
– Scene detection
– Audio analysis

Video Search Indexing - Issues
Problems with video retrieval mechanisms are evident:
• Not YET able to “understand” video content – metadata reliance
• Keyword-based searches with semantic expansion somewhat restricted
• Advanced mechanisms are nascent and insufficient:
– Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR)
• Only relevant if spoken word exists
• Applies mostly to English video files
• Audio quality - (e.g. field interviews)
– Concept detection
• Only as good as what goes in - quality
• Metadata creation takes time & effort
– hint – leverage automation in conjunction with human intervention
What does this mean?
• Search engines need to be told what a video is about
• Optimization is crucial to discovery, indexing, and ranking

Video Search – The Players
Video Search Engines
– All depend primarily on file metadata & on-page text
content
– Automatic speech to text recognition (Google, Blinkx)
– Object recognition & concept detection (Google)
– Facial recognition (Videosurf)
Meta Search
– Aggregation of content from multiple sources (Most
video search engines have moved in this direction)
General Search Engines
– Universal search, federated, blended, etc…
Video Destination Sites
– YouTube, Metacafe, blip TV, and many many more…

Important Search Industry Trends
May 2007 - Google’s Universal Search
• Google Launches Universal Search initiative to integrate listings from its news, video,
images, local & book search engines into Google SERPS
July 2008 - Adobe Partners with Google & Yahoo
“Unlike HTML code used on Web sites &found by search engines, rich
media today is opaque,” said Mark Randall, chief strategist of the
company’s dynamic media group. “We want to make it more discoverable.”
December 2008 - YouTube = Major Search Engine
• YouTube becomes the 2nd largest search engine in terms of pure search queries
• Beats Yahoo for first time

Video Search – Trends in Discovery

Video Search Discovery Trends
Searches for Video
– 38% of all US online users report using search engine results to discover video 1
• Vs. from a portal (19%)
• Vs other video destination sites (11%)
YouTube Searching
– 54% of online consumers reported using the site to discover video 1
– June 2009 – 3.6 Billion search queries, 27% of all Google queries & second largest
search engine 2
Search Engine Referral Traffic
– Share of video referral traffic from search engines 3
• 11.18% - general search engines (Youtube excluded)
• 0.63% - video search engines (e.g. blinkx, truveo, etc…)
Sources: 1JupiterResearch/NPD Group Individual User Survey (6/08) | 2 Comscore Search Rankings (6/09) | 3Tubemogul (2/09)

Trends in Share of Search Referral Traffic
% of category % ∆ in share of % of category % ∆ in share of
traffic from traffic from traffic from traffic from
Category
search engines search engines Google Google
4/09 4/08-7/09 4/09 4/08 – 4/09
Health & Medical 46.29% 1% 33.88% 10%
Travel 36.82% 8% 27.91% 20%
Shopping & Classifieds 24.04% -5% 17.28% 4%
News & Media 21.35% -2% 15.48% 6%
Entertainment 26.51% 11% 18.78% 24%
Business & Finance 20.91% 16% 15.01% 29%
Sports 14.93% 20% 10.88% 30%
Online Video** 36.04% 25% 27.24% 39%
Social Networking** 17.73% 6% 11.87% 18%
All figures are based on U.S. data from the Hitwise sample of 10 million Internet users. **Denotes a custom category
Source: Hitwise, an Experian company

Videos Dominate Universal Search Results
Videos Dominate Universal Search
38% of users who searched Google
were served video in Universal search
engine results pages
Source – “Google Universal Search Results Searcher Penetration by Result Type” – ComScore – Jan 2008

Does this Represent a Shift to Search?
Web Search Volume: “Video(s)” vs. “News” vs. “God” vs. “Sex”

Video SEO – Definition & Methods

What is Video SEO?
The application of SEO best practices in order to ensure that video
content achieves maximum discoverability across search engines &
ultimately, visibility amongst your target audience
Video SEO IS
– Helping search engines more easily “understand” video content
– To be used in conjunction with overall best practices for general SEO
– Something to play an important role in an overall video strategy
– A method to drive valuable traffic to your video content
Video SEO is NOT
– Smoke & mirrors
– About “fooling” search engines
– An end in-and-of itself

Options for Video SEO & Discoverability
Options for Online Video SEO
• Hosted - Website Video SEO
– Optimization of video content that is on
your website
• Posted – Video Syndication SEO
– Optimization of video content uploaded
to video sharing sites, social media, etc…
Commonality
– General principles for on-page & off-page
SEO apply

Video SEO Best Practices

Top 5 Things to Get Right - Strategy
1. Benchmarking
– Measure Current State & Set Goals
2. Identify the Target Audience
– Do your research (Keyword research critical)
Think about the words users would type to find your pages,
and make sure that your site actually includes those words
within it.“ - (Google)
3. Approach SEO Holistically
– Focus on optimizing your entire website, while at the same
time more deeply integrating your video content
4. Focus on Quality & Engagement
– Nothing works as well for SEO as unique, quality content
5. Measure Success

Top 10 Things to Get Right - Tactics
1. Create Links to Your Video Section
– Don’t make difficult for users to find
Video Landing Page Anatomy
2. 1 Video/URL & Unique URLS w/Keywords
3. Use Embedded Players – Not Pop-ups
4. Optimize the Video Landing Page
– Follow general SEO principles for titles, URLs,
metadata, H1, etc…
5. Provide Context to Surround Video Content
– Leverage robust metadata generation to dynamically
build:
• Contextually related links (products, videos, articles)
• Related on-page text (tags, captions, comments)
• Text transcripts of any audio content
– Accessibility and search engine optimization tip

Top 10 Things to Get Right - Tactics
6. Make it easy for search engine crawlers to discover your video content.
– Enable &expose MRSS feeds/ XML
– Consider linking to your file & offering multiple file formats
7. Enable interaction & Social media
– social bookmarking, embedding, commenting &rating
8. Link to videos with keyword rich anchor text
– “Watch this” vs. “View the Harry Potter Trailer”
9. Create compelling thumbnails for your own SERPS
– The thumbnail needs to be eye-catching and representative. It needs to show the
potential viewer what they can expect from the video and it needs to be of interest,
relevant, and high quality.
10. Incorporate video results within your own site search

Thank You
Mark R. Robertson, Founder
www.reelseo.com
Twitter.com/reelseo
Facebook.com/reelseo