Video is very powerful and if video marketing is done correctly, you can drive a significant amount of free traffic to any website. If you can go the sexy route like GoDaddy.com or just provide fresh content like any of the thousands of video blogs on YouTube.
Here are 10 tips to help you optimize video:
1 – Do keyword research to determine the best tags for your video.
- Forget common sense, tag based on how people are searching
- Don’t keyword stuff – the video search engines look for that and will mark you down for it
- Don’t tag with popular yet irrelevant search terms
2 – Build a page on your site for each video that you produce and make sure you tag it with meta data appropriately
3 – Add rich metadata to the video as well. Most video search today is still based on metadata
4 – Make sure that you are consistent with how you tag it across the various video sharing sites
5 – Utilize Thumbnails – YouTube takes the frame from the 1/4, 1/2 and 3/4 mark and let’s you pick which one to use as your thumbnail
6 – Show your call to action (ie.your phone number) in your thumbnail so when your YouTube video shows up in the Google Search Results the call to action will be front and center
7 – Do not use active X controls as there is no active x control in YouTube
8 – Avoid flash only and entirely dynamic video
9 – Video Length – people don’t want to watch a 4 min video. Look at your analytics. If your video is 2 minutes long and people are leaving the page at 30 seconds then you know your video’s too long
10 – Don’t forget to incorporate a call to action at the end of the video
A bonus tip is, be consistent in providing fresh content. Content is king on the Internet. Oh yeah, don’t ever give up.
