This document discusses strategies for optimizing videos for search engines. It covers how videos are found online, the importance of YouTube, and whether videos should be posted to sites or hosted on a website. It provides tips for optimizing videos on YouTube and a website, including submission, ranking factors, metadata, on-page elements, site structure, and sharing options. It emphasizes that video now dominates search and that both posted and hosted video strategies should be used to maximize exposure and drive traffic.

1. Apogee Results | © 2013
2013 Video SEO &
Video Promotional
Strategies for YouTube
and Beyond
Leake@apogeeresults.com
William Leake, It’s My Fault (aka CEO)
Apogee Results
@Marketing_Bill

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I. How are online videos found?
II. Importance of YouTube
III. Posted vs. Hosted
IV. YouTube Optimization
I. Submission
II. Ranking Factors
III. Video Site Map
IV. YouTube Retargeting
V. New Ability: Editing an existing video
V. Optimizing Videos on your website
What We Will Cover

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Universal Search: Dominated By Video

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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 January 2012

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Source: TechCrunch
And Yet…Video Views Fizzle Quickly

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Time & Dollars, Create Video Time & Dollars, Promote Video
Because…

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Partial Video Search Engine List

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It’s A YouTube/Google World

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Source: TechCrunch
It’s A YouTube/Google World, But…

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Video SEO Produces More Sales than Traditional SEO
“65% of senior executives surveyed visited a vendors site after watching a video.
Executives said they were more likely to make a purchase of call a vendor.”
Source: 2011 Forbes study, “Video in the C-Suit”
Video SEO vs. Traditional SEO

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Over 70% of all web usage and over 50% of all mobile device usage is on video
viewing – and it is forecasted that 90% of consumer IP traffic (the majority of total IP
traffic) will be video in 2014.”
Source: “Cisco Visual Networking Index: Forecast and Methodology, 2010-2015”
Cisco Confirms: Video Is the New SEO

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• Generation 1.0
• Depend primarily on metadata and on-page text
• Most are working on evolving
• Generation 2.0
• Use metadata, on-page text, UGC and advanced recognition technologies
(speech, visual, facial, OCR, etc..)
Video Search Engines

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Posted: video content uploaded to video sharing sites, social media, etc…
and/or
Hosted: video content that is on YOUR website
Basic Options

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• EXISTING TRAFFIC – Existing video websites have a critical mass of traffic and
users, easier to go viral
• Better ability to rank on universal search (Google) and other search engines
• Potential to dominate the traditional SERPs with “carpet bombing,” by
submitting to multiple video sites (due to weak duplicate content filtering at
present)
• Don’t need your own website
Benefits of Posted Video SEO

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• Control – over related on-page text, encoded metadata, user-experience,
etc...
• Control over monetization/advertising
• Generate traffic to your website
• While you can currently dominate the SERPs with “carpet bombing,” posted
strategies, this may go away with duplicate content filtering in the future
Benefits of Hosted Video SEO

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• Second largest search engine
• Third most visited website (800 million uniques, only 50 million less than FB)
• 60 hours of video uploaded EVERY minute (was 48 hours in 2011 and 20
hours in 2009)
• Over 4 BILLION Videos viewed a day (was 3 billion in 2011)
• http://www.youtube.com/t/press_statistics
YouTube

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• Ranking
• Honors
• Links
• Comments
• Share
• Subscribers
• Video Age
• View Count
Top Ranking Factors
• Title, description, keyword tags
• Annotations
• Thumbs Up / Down
• Flagging
• Video Responses
• Channel Views
• # of Embeds
• Playlists

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• YouTube only allows you to search YouTube
• YouTube may be king, but it doesn’t have ALL the interesting content
• Copyright issues re: content still a real problem
Beyond YouTube

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• Metadata (in-file)
• Indexing in-file metadata is still a weak point of search engines, but this is improving
• Encode your video files with solid, meaty metadata that includes your metadata title,
date, author, description and keywords.
Website Video SEO Tips

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• The Video Files Themselves …
• Offer multiple formats (e.g. mov, mpeg, mp4, flv)
• Include keywords in the filename
• Include the *video* in the filename too
Website Video SEO Tips

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• On-Page Elements
• Follow general SEO principles for optimizing title, meta, H1, etc. tags and URLS…
• Definitely include contextually related links to articles and other videos
• Consider publishing captions and/or abstracts as additional relevant on-page
content.
Website Video SEO Tips

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• Site Structure
• Use Unique URLS
• One video per URL
• Use embedded players – never pop-ups
• Create nav links to the video content
• Place the videos in a central root folder/directory
Website Video SEO Tips

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• Remember it’s about Sharing
• Enable comments
• Include social bookmarking tools
• Allow visitors to subscribe to your videos
• Let viewers grab your embed code - easily (with a link)
• Remember internal linking (consider site-wide link(s) in your page footer)
Website Video SEO Tips

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•Search engines currently try hard (and often fail) to crawl the web and index video
content. BUT, in marked contrast to traditional SEO, don’t wait for them to find you.
Submit your video content.
•Media RSS (MRSS) Feed Syndication
•Most video search engines accept RSS / MRSS feeds (+ iTunes)
•MRSS is an RSS feed with media enclosure
TIP - If you have a problem, contact the video search engines, they are helpful and
want your content
How Do Videos Get Into Search Engines

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Missed Opportunity?

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SEO Optimized Video

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Tweets & Articles

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Integrated Contest

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Integrated Contest

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(aka Shameless Plug Slide)
• Apogee Results, based in Austin is the coolest “pure-play” online marketing firm in Texas, and one of the
largest independents left
– 100’s of clients, including Whole Foods, National Public Radio, Golfsmith, Lance Armstrong / Livestrong,
Olive Garden, IBM, PerkinElmer, SAP, Hewlett Packard, Shell, Merrill Lynch + more high growth VC-
backed and Inc.5000 clients than any other firm
– Paid, Earned and Owned Online Media, Website Effectiveness & Conversion
• Our management team built *the first* company to ever sell a million dollars of product on the internet
• Our management team has been doing search engine optimization since 1995, paid search since early 1998
(within 2 days of GoTo’s launch) and social since 2003
• Founder’s background includes McKinsey & Co., Dell, and executive roles at successful, private-equity-backed
firms
• All programs are results-focused and metrics-based
We *might* Know Something

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• Apogee Results Blog: www.ApogeeResults.com/Blog/
• WebMaster World: www.webmasterworld.com
• DigitalPoint Forums: forums.digitalpoint.com
• Search Engine Land: searchengineland.com
• Sphinn: sphinn.com
• MarketingSherpa: marketingsherpa.com
• ClickZ: clickz.com
Additional Resources and Q&A