Online video has grown into a key element for the majority of Internet users. Today’s audience is looking for content that is not only informational, but also engaging. This reins true especially for the younger audience. A recent study, conducted by the National Research Center for College and University Admissions, found that 55% of prospective students have watched videos on a college’s website.

The most important part of successful online video is to first identify who you want to reach, and how you want your message to affect them. For example, because the “buying cycle” for higher education is so long and complicated, we break it up into three sections: the research phase, consider phase, and commit phase. It is imperative to create engaging brand experiences across all stages. The following will help break down how you can utilize video to connect with students at each phase.

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The Research Phase

In this phase, the most important thing is to grab their attention. Colleges and Universities that utilize online video content on their websites and YouTube can significantly improve their Google ranking and increase traffic to their site. Video is a great way to build initial attraction. Here are three types of videos you can use to connect with students in the research phase:

Educational/Tutorial Videos

These types of videos are great to create awareness and position your brand as a resource, whether that’s tips, guides, how-tos, etc. And, ‘How-to’ is one of the most common type of queries in YouTube. Try producing a how-to series based on a subject surrounding one of your areas of study. For example, if you have a strong design and development program, offer a video series on how to design and develop your own website, sponsored by your school. But be careful not to add much “sales” talk.

High-Profile Speaker/CommencementConan’s Commencement

If your school schedules a high-profile speaker, consider recording a clip and uploading it to YouTube. For example, Conan O’Brien’s commencement speech at Dartmouth has over 500,000 views. This is a great way to generate a lot of views and draw attention to your school.

Narrative

Compelling, storytelling videos are perfect for generating “buzz” for your brand. Try adding comedy or a captivating emotion to your videos. Look for stories that demonstrate what is unique and different about your school. These types of videos are the best for social sharing and high view counts, making a perfect combination for drawing attention.

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The Consider Phase

In the consider phase, it is important to start capturing leads for nurturing. This is where it is key to create brand validation and focus on starting to target degree specific leads. Online video is the next best thing to in-person communication and experience. It can really bring your school to life, which is important in this phase. Here are three ways to use video to nurture students in the consider phase:

Student Testimonials

Research shows that 31% of people will make a positive decision after viewing a testimonial video. Prospective students are increasingly looking online to see what other students and peers say about a school. Having students talk about why they enjoy your school so much can do wonders to convince an applicant. But it is critical to find a student who is relatable and compelling on camera, someone who is able to talk about the school with passion.

Tour of the Schoolcampus tour screen shot

Pictures of the campus are good, but a video tour is so much better. A video can truly immerse the viewer in the experience so that they feel like they are actually there. This can be a powerful marketing tool, which allows you to really focus on the most spectacular parts of the school, like the architecture, quad, or overall atmosphere.

Lectures and Classrooms

It is important to focus on degree specific content in this phase. If you have a particularly engaging professor or exciting class, consider recording it and putting in online. A prospective student may feel drawn to the school through the video in a way that could not have been achieved through plain text or images. These types of videos are a great way for students and parents to gain insight into an academic subject that may be a potential area of study.

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The Commit Phase

Throughout this phase it is important to nurture your leads with segmented, targeted messaging and a proactive call to action strategy. It is also critical to remove any anxiety, answer any last minute questions, and ease potential friction in the process. Here are two types of videos that are perfect for targeting a student in the commit phase:

Informational Videos

Informational video is a great way to make the application process transparent and humanize the process, which is perfect for easing any applicant through the commit phase. Offer a series of brief informational or how-to videos on topics like the breakdown of the application process, what financial aid is available and how to obtain it, what to include in an application cover letter, or how to fill out the FASFA forms. Videos like these can really help an applicant feel comfortable with making their decision.

Targeted Faculty Storiesfaculty screen shot

Featuring faculty members with personal interviews showcasing their academic departments can help target degree specific interests and give applicants a sense of whether your school’s program is a good fit for them. This type of segmented, targeted messaging can help turn a prospective student into a decided applicant.

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What’s Next?

In total, schools have uploaded 63,500 hours – or about 7 years – worth of video content onto the web. If your school is not one of them, you will rapidly fall behind. Potential students are looking to interact with your brand, and video is one of the best ways to offer that interaction.

Author: Abigail Carter

Courtesy of www.fathomdelivers.com

This SEO technique is definitely on the grey side and could push your stance on “SEO ethics”. Odds are that you have subscribed to this newsletter because of my previous questionable posts such as building links with expired content and how to buy links and get away with it. Remember that my suggestions and tips aren’t about being “right” or “wrong” its simply about techniques that get the job done. No Hats, No BS, Just Results.

Building Content With Transcribed Videos

It doesn’t matter what your niche is – there is something of value on your topic on YouTube. The goal here is to find a video that offers a lot of value and then have it transcribed through a service such as speechpad.com. For less than $15 you can get a 800+ word well researched and pretty well written post for any of your websites. Let me run you through an example.

Find A Video That Offers Valuable Information.

The very first step to this technique is finding a YouTube video that offers value to your niche. The example I’m going to use is learning how to tie a tie. With a very quick Google Keyword Tool search I can see that their is a lot of value in content related to learning how to tie a tie correctly.

If I had a website in the wedding industry, tuxedo / suit rental or maybe even the fashion industry I would definitely want content surrounding this topic. The numbers above show the demand for this type of information and you can supply it without even having to know how to tie a tie! How-to guides and other value providing content are great linkable assets to any website.

Requirements To Find The Right Video

You will want to search for your article topic in Google and sort by video or of course you can search directly in YouTube itself. From there you will want to look at just a couple factors that help determine what video will be best for transcribing into article content. Make sure that…

After 10-15 minutes sifting through YouTube I found something that I would consider using.

Transcribing The Video Into Useful Content.

Now that I found a decent video on the topic of tying a tie (more specifically a Windsor knot) and determined that the video explains the information in an appropriate manor for reading purposes, its time to transcribe the video.

After creating an account with Speechpad.com (or another service of your choice) you’ll want to upload the video. In this case Speechpad allows me to upload the audio file by simply imputing the YouTube video URL.

After uploading the YouTube audio file you want transcribed you’ll go to a check out page. Here you can choose the rate in which you want to the video to get transcribed. Speechpad offers a 24 hour turn-around time, 28 hour turn-around time and a one week turn around time service – all at different rates. I typically go with the 48 hour time period but choose what works with your schedule and budget.

This particular audio file was just over 2 minutes 20 seconds so I fully anticipate about a 500 word transcription after it’s processed. Once you get the audio filed transcribed you’ll want to sit down and clean it up just a bit. In this instance I would bullet point or number each step. I may even go one step further and take a screen shot of each step during the video. This of course ads to the risk of this technique as someone could recognize the screen shots. It’s up to you to determine your risk tolerance.

Outbound Transcribed Link Building

Ever since Penguin and Panda were released webmasters have been even more cautious as to who they accept guest posts from. No longer do websites accept the post you had written on oDesk.com for $10.00. Site’s are now valued by Google for the quality of content they produce so its time to offer some substantial, researched and well laid out content. Transcribed video content is fantastic for this. You get 10 times better content for roughly the same price as your outsourced content writer produces.

Since you want to offer up this content as a guest post you’ll want to make sure you do all your research before offering up your transcribed content. To avoid duplicate content issues make sure to run your new article through copyscape. You’ll also want to make sure you don’t transcribe something that will take you all night to edit and make into a quality piece of content.

Like any other link building technique, this isn’t a technique to solely rely on but can be a great asset to your existing link building arsenal.

Author: Nick LeRoy

Courtesy of www.nickleroy.com

In the past few years, as owner of a video production company, I’ve noticed a real shift in what clients are requesting. A few years ago, it was mostly the typical sales pitch video. But, now clients want more. They’re looking for ways to connect with their audience, to use emotion, and to create a lasting impression. This is a promising trend for all of us in the professional video industry. Below are a few reasons to embrace the trend of storytelling in videos.

1. Storytelling sets us apart as video professionals in a world where anyone can shoot and edit

As professionals, we strive to do a much better job than our clients could do just setting up a camera and reading a script. New editing software and cheap digital cameras make everyone a video producer. But, once we hone the craft of telling great stories, our clients can’t really emulate that. And, they don’t want to spend the time it takes to master the art.

Three Reasons to Embrace Video Storytelling

2. Storytelling videos are much more likely to be shared online

Sales pitch videos, though they certainly have their place, aren’t really likely to be shared online. But, when you create a humorous, interesting, thought-provoking, or problem solving video, people will share it. Consider this example.

My company, Marietta Video Productions, got a call from the owner of a commercial painting company. He wanted us to shoot one of his restaurants being painted. When he told me the restaurant was The Big Chicken, one of Atlanta’s iconic landmarks, I asked him to let us tell that story, not just shoot some video. He agreed and arranged to allow us to interview a couple of others involved in the project.

The result was a really fun video that accomplished the goal – a great response from the people who mattered – his clients. They didn’t just watch the video, they enjoyed it, laughed at it, and shared it. The video helped to create a deeper alliance between him and his customers. It portrayed him as a caring, creative, and fun guy who really goes above and beyond for his customers. It also gave his customer’s a deeper understanding about what sets his company apart from his competitors.

3. Storytelling videos can be very efficient and can help you get the sale.

Some clients have a really tough time narrowing down the points they want to make in a script. The process of developing a script and storyboard can be very time consuming.

All clients want to bring too many ideas and thoughts into a video while still keeping it short. And, if the client can’t really articulate their vision, and they’re relying on you to come up with what they want, sometimes, you can lose the sale.

I’ve learned over the years that when I tell a client we will develop their story from conducting interviews instead of creating a script and storyboard, it eases their stress. The client trusting you – the video producer – to pull out the best portions of the interviews and keep the ideas concise gets the ball rolling and helps you land the sale.

The process is simple. We do interviews, preferably with the client and the business owner. We send the audio files to a video transcription company, such as CopyTalk™. We get the transcripts back in a couple of days and write the stories completely from the interviews, just like a news reporter does. I use information in the narration, and I use the interviews to convey opinion and emotion.

Keep in mind, storytelling does not have to be expensive for your client. We use stock video in some cases and build the story around what we can find. In most cases, it’s much easier and less time consuming than developing a script and trying to get clients to say something that’s scripted rather than the conversational style of an interview.

In the Data Center video below, we used stock footage for the opening scene. We told the story through the eyes of our client’s customer, and we developed the script from the interviews. This video achieved its goal as well, helping our client “connect” with their prospects. It’s helped them close several key sales.

Storytelling seems to be the buzzword right now in video. It’s not just the interview style of storytelling clients want. No matter how you tell the story, whether using interviews or a script, keep in mind, the components of storytelling such as emotional characters, a fun or dramatic plot, and engaging settings are more likely to land a great response and be shared online.

Author: Donna Davis

Courtesy of www.reelseo.com

1. DO YOU NEED A GREAT BLOG?

We are about to launch a new website called Blogican.com with services that a lot of people wanted forever.

Do you have a great idea for a blog, but don’t have time or skills to creat one, so it looks top notch? Or, may be, you need to quickly add another WordPress blog to your blog network and make sure everything is setup right? Blogican squad of professionals will install and setup from scratch a great looking, SEO optimized WordPress blog on your or our hosting account with premium theme, logo and set of great plugins IN ANY NICHE YOU LIKE. We will fine-tune everything the way it is supposed to be.

There will be basic and premium setup packages available, where premium one offered with original content, premium plugins and lots of other extra goodies.

Blogican.com is launching on Monday, April 22nd, 2013.

Click to learn more »

2. DO YOU NEED HELP WITH EXISTING BLOG(S)?

Blogican.com will be also offering some great monthly services for existing blogs, new or old, for very affordable fees:

• Blog updates – where we will keep your blog’s WordPress software, theme and plugins always up-to-date and functional
• Blog hosting – unlimited WordPress optimized hosting
• Blog content – human written articles – researched, created and published to your blog with relevant images on a monthly basis. Or, existing articles, republished from popular article directories with relevant images. Or News Sets in any niche regularly posted to your blog. Or related videos from YouTube or other video sites posted to your blog with titles, descriptions and even comments.
• Blog monetization – e-commerce products with your affiliate links from popular marketplaces or datafeeds autoposted to your blog.
• Blog SEO & Promotion – various services to help you promote your blog and increase quality traffic.

Click to learn more »
 

Blogican is BLOG I CAN where you can blog because you want to!

Understanding how to optimize a video is going to be incredibly important for the remainder of the year. It is no secret that more and more consumers are turning to video as a way to educate themselves and learn more about certain products and services.

Video helps make complicated topics easy to understand, and it helps keep consumers engaged. This is largely part of the reason that Google has put out so many videos to compliment the articles they write.

When it comes to creating a video for your average small business, it is typically published on the website, YouTube, or both.

This means that the video needs to be optimized in the same way that a piece of content needs to be optimized. You still want your video to earn a top search engine result ranking—even if the way you get there is slightly different.

How to Optimize a Video for Search Engines

Optimizing your videos works similarly to content, but you might want to be focusing on YouTube ranking more than Google ranking. In either case, there are a few tips that you should follow to get you to the top:

Title and Description

Keywords are everything, and your title and description are great places to incorporate these keywords. Google bots can only determine what a video is about by the text on the page, so make the most of it! Also as a side note, you don’t want your title to be longer than 66 characters because Google will truncate anything longer.

Various Tags

Tags work the same way that they work with traditional content. You want to use not only your keywords, but also tag the content with words and phrases that someone might use to look up that particular video. When it comes to YouTube, the related articles on the side of the webpage are chosen based on the similarity between tags. This can help you earn clicks.

Earn Backlinks

Videos benefit from backlinks just like articles. The more websites linking to your video, the better it looks in the eyes of the bots. If you’re ever writing an article and posting it on another website (or even your own website), don’t forget to link back to your video page.

Transcriptions

Transcriptions of the video are great for those who like to follow along, but they also work well for optimization. If you mention your keyword a lot in your video (which you should), a transcript will only improve the keyword density of that page. It helps the bots index that content correctly.

Rich Snippets

Enabling rich snippets is a great way to show Google users that you have a great video on a particular subject. Rich snippets allow the video to show up right on a Google SERP.

Many companies consider using an SEO plugin for video to help make sure they don’t miss a beat. An SEO plugin will help you check off all of these different optimization methods and remind you if you’re missing something that could help your video rank. One of the most popular plugins include SEO by Yoast. You can learn more and read about more choices here.

Author: Amanda DiSilvestro

Courtesy of www.link-assistant.com

If Not, You Could Be Missing Out

Many people wouldn’t think there is a link between SEO and videos on your website. In fact, the two are very much related. Especially with the popularity of YouTube, video is more important than ever in getting your message across. Search engine crawlers see multimedia elements on a webpage as more diverse, as opposed to just text, so this helps to boost your SEO efforts. Of course, the video description, tags, and title all need to keep your site’s SEO in mind, too. Another benefit of this is that your website and your video could show up in the results, giving you two spots instead of just one.

Reading a website can be cold and impersonal. Even with the most descriptive of text, it can be hard to convey emotion through words. Video allows you to speak your message on your site your way. It will be as if your clients already know you before they even officially become clients. While most people don’t like seeing themselves on video, no one knows your business like you do. Be your brand ambassador, don’t be afraid!

What if I Can’t Afford Video Production?

Videos don’t have to cost a lot of money to produce. Most computers today come with a built in camera and some sort of basic editing software. Or better yet, try and shoot your video in one take and no editing will be necessary. Smart phones and digital cameras also have the ability to shoot video, and small flip-cams are becoming more and more affordable.

Many lawyers have begun using videos on their website, since they are in a competitive industry. For example, when I searched for “south Florida personal injury attorney” I came across this video. It was done in one take, with very little post production. I found his video which contained a link to his website.

Keep your video short, around 2 minutes or less. It is ok to reiterate information that is already found elsewhere on your site. The chances that every person who visits your site will read every page and watch your entire video is pretty slim. Don’t overestimate the attention span of the average internet surfer. Even if some of the information is repeated, then it just further engrains the message into the viewer’s head.

I Made My Video, Now What?

A lot of companies that specialize in SEO are already aware how to optimize videos. If you are using a web marketing company, they should be able to help you with embedding the video as well as optimizing your video. Most web companies have SEO experts and web design experts working side by side. A web designer will be able to advise on the best placement of the video, and adjusting the size of the video player if necessary. SEO experts will optimize the video’s title, description, tags, and permalink if applicable.

If you do not employ a web marketing company, search for YouTube videos in your industry. For example, if you are in shoe repair, type “shoe repair” into the search box. Several shoe repair companies have created videos. The Delmar Bootery in Albany, NY has this video on YouTube, which also appears in a Google search for “Albany shoe repair,”. When I visit their website, I see that they have the same video on their homepage.

More than Just YouTube

There are several websites available for hosting videos to embed on your website. Viddler, Vimeo, and Flickr are just a few sites that also provide video hosting. Facebook also hosts videos, and this could be used to drive traffic to your social media site.

The Friday Traffic Report blog has compiled an impressive list of video hosting websites. Not only is this list exhaustive, it provides the page rank of each site. There are also additional links that can help you to further market your video, if you are so inclined.

With these tips, your website will be a more personal, multi-media experience for visitors. This will also increase your chances of showing up in search engine results.

Author: Leslie Duncan

Courtesy of www.seochat.com

The effectiveness of video marketing

Just how useful are videos in the grand scheme of things?

Videos are pretty darn awesome when it comes to making things happen. Videos can be used to demonstrate something, communicate a message, share a sentiment, or to condense a concept that might otherwise be too much to handle into a shorter-seeming visual presentation.

When it comes to internet marketing, videos are winning the day. People like videos….and they like them a lot. A brief glance at the number of results on YouTube for any common query is proof that videos are one of the most popular forms of content being produced today.

What does this mean for you? It’s a clue to the mystery that is marketing success, and if you can work your branded magic on it just right you can be looking at your ticket to fame, glory, and customer satisfaction!

How you can use videos to reach out

Finally, something more personal than an email or direct message!

Videos are a great way to reach out to people either individually or as a group. A great example of this is recognizing new friends / fans / followers on your social media accounts. The new Vine app from Twitter is ideal for this sort of quick recognition for Twitter users seeking to help their followers feel appreciated.

A video can also be a call to action, showing viewers how they can act to work towards a good cause or for the benefit of all involved in a given situation. Think public service announcements and outreach videos from charities.

If your brand needs to tell a story, a video is often the way to go. People are usually more willing to sit through a few minutes of video than they are to read a long blog post, regardless of whether or not the two pieces of content take the same amount of time to consume. What can we say? We (web users in general) really like videos!

Complicated ideas or concepts that would take a little more time to explain can be demonstrated or illustrated using a short video presentation. Consider creating a video to demo a product or service versus trying describe it in a blog post, podcast, or infographic. With video users are exposed to both visual and audio cues, making things much easier to understand in less time.

And of course who can forget good old-fashioned entertainment! Releasing a video is certainly an ideal way to show off your brand’s fun side and let your hair down.

Getting your audience involved

Producing your own videos is a great idea, but after a while it can get a little one-sided. If you really want people to engage with your brand, why not encourage them to create their own videos to share with you?

Big-name brands often hold contests in order to get their audience more involved with their brand. Users can submit videos based on a theme and the brand then chooses the best submission – the creator of that video then receives a prize of some kind, even if that is only recognition from the brand through its various social channels.

Regardless of what incentives you provide or which avenue you choose to take, you really cannot go wrong with a user-generated video initiative. Depending on your target audience you could see a marked increase in engagement and user satisfaction as more people make a connection with your brand.

Video marketing tips, tricks, and insights

Video: 5 Reasons Why You Must Do Video Marketing Today

Author: RankPop Team

Courtesy of www.rankpop.com

You Can Get A Page 1 Google Ranking Easier

Way back in 2007 Google launched Universal search on its site, which allowed results for images, news, local listing and video content to appear on Page 1 of its traditional search results. The videos coming into this search, more often than not, are YouTube videos. This means that your video on YouTube can jump the entire SEO competition and secure a Page 1 Google listing without having to do any extensive SEO to improve your Google ranking.

Courtesy of www.fridaytrafficreport.com

Purna Virji @punavirji heads search marketing for an e-commerce company. Why do we love YouTube? She plays a video of a news segment where a news guy is seeing a Texas rat snake and gets scared and jumps away. Everyone laughs, I scream (out loud…).

There’s a myth that YouTube is a branding tool. Not true – as direct response advertisers they make “a killing”. There are 3 types of TrueView ads (inslate, instream, indisplay) and she’s just going to focus on indisplay. Indisplay ads show up on the side of videos that pay across the content network. You’re only charged when someone selects to play your ad. She studied the types of Trueview ads and found in-search and in-display were the winners. After the initial ramp-up the campaign is low maintenance.

Step 1: pick the right video. Leave 15-30 second videos for in-search, and here do 2-14 minutes. Check YouTube Insights for views, engagement, mobile stats. Add related videos and don’t be a one-hit wonder.

Related video ideas: testimonials, product details, humor. Use your blog posts, see FAQs, turn infographics into videos. Portent has a content idea generator that might give you an idea.

Step 2: optimizing your channel page. If you have a slightly higher spend on YouTube paid search, apply for a custom channel. It gives you custom images, content accessibility filters and enhanced tracking capabilities. Contact your Google rep for this, but it won’t be available to everyone since there are spend requirements.

YouTube One Channel is an alternative and anyone can set one up. It encourages subscriptions. There are flexible design options and incredibly easy to customize.

MVPs for conversion rate:

clear calls to action

free banner ad

Step 3: selecting the right keywords. YouTube is higher up on the sales funnel so go with broader keywords. Use the YouTube keyword tool.

Step 4: creating effective ads. Think like paid search. Setup ad groups tightly. Choose the thumbnail image wisely, it helps with CTR. When choosing destination page she recommends to always choose channel page.

Step 5: leveraging annotations. Add annotation button, choose style, perfect it with colors and fonts and you’re done. You can have it show up as a call to action in the video itself – note only links to other videos in the video are clickable, so use vanity URLs. You can apply for external annotations! (This is treated like a secret.)

Trick to drive clicks to related videos: have existing video play for a few more seconds with a white background and change annotation for related videos.

Step 6: building trust. Set aside 20 minutes each day for YouTube community management.

Step 7: continued optimization.

Ron Fusco is our next speaker. Video views and other marketing channels in general drive brand awareness, which tends to be more difficult to measure. You control the impressions, targets, location and volume easily. The easiest way to find and measure brand awareness is through paid search. Searching for brand is interest in brand.

Vary video views, and it’s comparable to a public service announcement test – turn it off for time and know the time you’re alternating. You need volume for this to have an impact.

Then crunch the data in Excel, he suggests with scatter plots.

YouTube search is still search. People search a little differently, more how-to, consume content, but still intent there so you want to stay relevant. Make sure your copy is relevant and treat your video page like your landing page. Don’t sell your product, sell the content.

YouTube remarketing is one of the coolest things about AdWords for video. Every video you have, Google builds a list of who’s watching it. You can play with these lists, target Google Display Network with regular advertising. These are people who have engaged with content, they’re still upper funnel but they have an understanding of what the brand’s about. You can also remarket with video. Say a user’s been to your site and didn’t convert. Maybe a banner isn’t right to move them down the funnel, so try a video to bring them back to the funnel and work them down.

Link the YouTube account to AdWords. You get engagement metrics inside the UI so you don’t have to step outside to GA You also get call to action overlay when you do this – outside links in annotations. And accounts must be linked in order for YouTube to build up a remarketing list. Multiple YouTube accounts can link to one GA account.

Creating lists is a place to get creative. You’ll see many list types, divided by how they interacted with your content on YouTube. You can overlay YouTube lists. In AdWords he’s found contextual targeting works the best for direct response. You can overlay YouTube lists with contextual targeting and you get a highly engaged audience.

Call to action overlays are clickable and can link to your site. You don’t need a Google rep for this, anyone can do it free.

Jake Larsen @jakelarsen7 (see my interview with Jake Larsen from last week for some in-depth knowledge share) asks how many people are already using Trueview and wants to know why some people want to try it but maybe haven’t yet. YouTube changed their layout this week and channel banner will be phased out.

Trueview lets you get super targeted with your audience, interest of person, topics of content of page and you can combine the two. You can also target keywords. Remarketing is where they’ve seen their most success. You can remarket from your channel or remarket your channel. You can also target by placement, which works if you separate channels. YouTube gives you target predictions – he doesn’t know how accurate that is.

7 TrueView tips:

1. Build the video around the click. What’s a view? Half the ad or 30 seconds. How much does it cost? You get charged per view, not per click. If you can get someone to click the screen, in takes them to your landing page and pauses the video. That click doesn’t cost you if you get them to click before the 30 seconds is up!

2. Have a good landing page that converts well. This is half the battle.

3. Be interesting. With TrueView the viewer can skip the ad after 5 seconds. If you don’t have their attention after 5 seconds they don’t want what you’re offering – that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

4. Experiment.

5. Retarget.

6. Be clear. This is who I am. This is what I do. This is what you need to do.

7. Measure everything.

Author: Virginia Nussey

Courtesy of www.bruceclay.com

Video content is no different than written content , in that there are certain SEO guidelines that should be implemented when posting it on the web.There are several reasons why you have video content or want to create video content. First off, it improves your chances of earning high-ranking video spots within Google. Also, it reaches out to the busy customers who prefer content in video format rather than text. Lastly, it is a good way to showcase a product or service features that cannot be easily shown through text or image content. Whatever your basis is for a solid video promotion campaign, you want to get your rank on Google’s Search Engine Results Page (SERP).

SEOing for Video Content

Before we go into detail about optimizing your videos, let’s ask ourselves this, “Who is my target audience and what are they interested in watching?” Discovering your target audience will be important when trying to come up with a title, key phrases, and tags for your video. You want you video to be exposed to the right audience! “Content is King”: creating valuable and unique content for your videos is a key starting point.

Youtube’s Video Ranking Algorithm

There are many factors YouTube takes into consideration when ranking a video. It is based on the number of views, video title, video description and video rating. Here is brief overview of what you’ll need to optimize after uploading your video.

7-Steps to Optimizing your Youtube Video

Make sure you conduct your keyword research first. YouTube has its own keyword tool: https://ads.youtube.com/keyword_tool and it’s a useful tool to keep in mind when conducting keyword research for video content. As a general rule, keep in mind the relevancy of these keywords in regards to your video content.

1. Optimizing the Title and File Name

The title plays a huge role in the visibility of your videos. You want to create a title that not only includes relevant keywords linking to your content, but is also descriptive enough so it can be easily searched for. In addition, add your relevant keywords into the file name of the video that you are uploading onto the video site. An example of a fully optimized file name for a video about how to bake a chicken would be: baking-chicken.

2. Optimizing Video Description

Next comes your video description. Some say it should not exceed 160 characters, but I say write something truly unique that describes your video content, with your key phrases in mind. If it is longer than 160 characters, don’t sweat it, add a compelling short text at the beginning.

3. Using Relevent Tags

The third factor is tags. You would want at least 10 tags that are keywords, relevant to your video. One differentiation between YouTube and Google is even if you have a video about one specific topic, as long as you do not use the right keywords, sometimes YouTube will not rank it. Therefore, make sure you input tags that are both plural and singular and understand what people are looking for when they watch your video.

4. Transcribing your Video

Transcription is yet another factor that helps rank your videos. YouTube has a feature that allows you to transcribe your video and they use those transcriptions to index and rank your video by keywords. This is becoming increasingly important because YouTube will index your keywords in your transcriptions that were never mentioned in your description. Transcribe your videos word for word and upload the text file. This will make your video closed captioned which increases your click through rate and will help your video rank better.

5. YouTube Channel Authority

Google looks for channels that have authority, using it as a basis for ranking. If you have engaging content on your other videos, create a channel so it helps that flow over to your current video and get it ranked. Thus, when adding videos, you also want to look at all of your videos and your channel as a whole, rather than just that single video. Other things to keep in mind are the channel elements. It is your public face on YouTube – customize your channel as much as possible (ideally to match the theme of your website). Also, give users a chance to follow you through other medium, by adding a link to your other social profiles on your about section.

6. Call to Action

Make sure you have a strong call to action in your video, and your video description. Add a link to other relevant pages like your website (most important). You can also take the extra step of embedding your video on your website, blog, other video sharing sites (Vimeo, Daily Motion), Facebook, Twitter, etc., have your viewers interact with your videos by liking, social sharing or replying to them via comments or video replies. Keep the conversation going!

7. Final Notes

So you came here to learn how you can achieve visibility for your video on YouTube. But don’t forget about your end users. All of these extra features have been implemented by YouTube to make it’s platform more user-friendly. Don’t try and “trick” the system with trending, yet irrelevant key phrases. When optimizing, keep your end users in mind.

Author: Jennifer Wong

Courtesy of www.pathinteractive.com

This is a BIG big episode of Friday Traffic Report! Everything you need to know NOW about new video marketing tactics you definitely don’t want to miss.

Courtesy of www.fridaytrafficreport.com

When I first saw my friend Emma’s YouTube video come through on my Facebook feed, it had about 75 views. A day later? Over 200,000. Four days later: almost 800,000 and climbing. What took this video to virility so quickly? A talented actress, a brilliant concept, and a few tried-and-true internet marketing tricks.

With a $100 budget, the video, “For Your Consideration” was shot by a 28-year-old USC Film School grad student named Alberto Belli and stars Emma Fitzpatrick. The video gained over 60,000 hits in its first hours and gained media coverage from The Daily Beast and USA Today, along with The Today Show, who put it up in a vote-off of the top four viral videos of the week. Putting a new spin on the lyrics to I Dreamed a Dream from the movie musical Les Miserables, the spoof grabs attention for not only its hilarity and killer vocals, but for its relevance to what people are searching for today.

Video is one of the most valuable marketing tools available. About 25% of all internet users visit YouTube in a given day, so if you’re not using video to attract your customers, your marketing campaign is lacking. What kind of video can attract the most traffic to your site, and what makes it go viral? Here are 6 steps to take in order to give your video a better chance at spreading to the masses.

1. Talk about what people are talking about.

What are the masses Googling right now? What’s on the news? What questions are people asking? “For Your Consideration” grabs viewers’ attention in the search; it’s talking about what people are talking about: the Oscars, Anne Hathaway, and Les Miserables. Now, Anne Hathaway may not be completely relevant to your business, but there are surely other things in current events that you can find a parallel with, especially within your own industry. Find a way to connect your content with what is significant in today’s world yet retains brand relevancy, be it pop culture, politics, or world news.

2. Make the content worth watching.

As it is said, Content is King, and that even applies to the content of a video. Script your material with care and recruit players who are enjoyable to watch. Maybe it’s only a how-to video for table-making, but that doesn’t mean your actors can’t be personable and rehearsed. Take the time to light your shoot accurately and steady your camera equipment. No one wants to watch a dark, shaky video, unless it’s The Blair Witch Project, which might just be your goal. Be intentional with whatever you do, and make sure all aspects of your video are in line with your goals.

3. Choose good keywords.

For the title, for the content, for the tags. If you’re using social mentions (Facebook, Twitter, Google+), use appropriate keywords in the posts. Draw people in with the right words and phrases that clearly indicate your message. YouTube’s description field is a perfect place to write a short narrative that includes all of those good keywords that will help make your video more easily found.

4. When you upload it, optimize it.

If we’re talking SEO, best to go to an expert. Art Enke, the Director of SEO Services here at Vertical Measures, weighs in on video marketing:

“First of all, don’t even think about NOT hosting your video on YouTube because roughly 70% of video results that show up in Google’s SERPs (search engine results pages) are hosted on YouTube. For example, do a quick search for “kite surfing” and scroll all the way down the page and count how many videos are hosted on non-YouTube platforms. Don’t get me wrong, Vimeo is an incredible platform and your unique video content should be curated on as many platforms as you like. However, be sure to only embed your YouTube video source if you’re serious about using video as part of your SEO strategy.”

Another good SEO tip from the “Art” of SEO:

“Place a URL to your site above the “YouTube fold” – there are only 3 lines of visible text from the description field above the ‘show more’ button.”

5. Know the value of a good video, and put some money into it if you have to.

For example, Dollar Shave Club put their entire marketing budget into one video, and when it launched in March of 2012, it was only a couple of weeks before it shot to the top of page #1 of Google’s SERPs ultra-competitive seed-keywords such as “shaving.” Over 12,000 people signed up for the company’s service in the first 48 hours alone. Learn more here about the whole Dollar Shave Club story.

6. Never underestimate the power of sharing.

“For Your Consideration” was a success, largely in part to those involved having a large social outreach. With just a few shares at just the right times, suddenly everyone was ‘liking it’ or ‘tweeting it’ or, most importantly, ‘sharing it.’ Encourage those involved with your project to pass it on. Every share helps. And link to your video whenever possible, be it in blog posts, articles, or even emails to clients.

Videos, in the eyes of the almighty Google, are considered to be a higher form of viewer engagement than a simple written blog post, and they can help to boost your rankings. You don’t have to be a professional videographer or director; you just have to put in the work to turn your idea into a video. If the Gangnam Style guy can do it (with over a billion Youtube views), so can you.

Author: Laura Holloway

Courtesy of www.verticalmeasures.com

A lot of marketers who begin using video in their businesses get confused as to where their priorities should be. Should they be working on getting their videos to rank well? Or should they be focusing on high quality videos that drive conversions and get shared by being embedded on blogs and shared on social media?

The answer is that both of these should be the focus of your efforts. Good videos can still be SEO friendly. In fact, a good video is more likely to rank well and offer a better return than a video made for SEO purposes only.

Let’s look at the differences.

Video For SEO Only

Some people make videos solely to put more content on the web with their web address or brand name attached to it. When they create videos, they put a simple slideshow together, run some background music, and over the course of a minute or two, they have a video ready to upload to sites like YouTube.

They put a keyword targeted title on the video, relevant tags, and a decent enough description that is keyword rich and features a link back to their site and then they start to get links.

This can certainly work to rank a video highly in the search engines. What it won’t do is help you to build your brand, drive traffic and funnel conversions.

Video For Quality Purposes

A quality video is easy to see, and probably not what you are thinking of. A good video is one that is easy to relate to, of a reasonable length, has quality audio and gives more than you ask for in your call to action.

Quality videos give enough value that even your competitors will want to embed them on their websites, share them to their social media connections, and link to them when they have a point to make that is made better by your video.

There is nothing fancy about making a quality video. People believe that they are not ready for video because they don’t have a white screen for a background, or professional grade video. All they need is a smart phone with a video camera, a steady hand, strong voice, and a great message to deliver.

All of this, combined with a willingness to put yourself out there for your audience to see, and to judge, will usually add up to a successful video marketing strategy.

When SEO Meets Quality

To make a quality video that is also search engine friendly, begin by brainstorming:

- What topics do I cover on my site for my business?

- Are there related keywords I can cover in my videos?

- Can I produce a video that easily covers the query?

- Can I create titles, descriptions and tags that fit the keyword and general topic without being spammy?

That is really all that is to it. From there, it is a matter of standard SEO practices, and other promotional practices like social media.

Never Compromise On Quality

In both your video production efforts, as well as the effort you put into your SEO campaigns, you need to ensure that you focus on quality. While quantity of and cheap tricks in terms of both promotion and production can be appealing, you are much better served by putting your full effort into everything you do.

Never compromise brand with shortcuts.

Author: Juliana Payson

Courtesy of www.seopalbg.com

Video content can make a huge splash in a marketing campaign. Social media allows marketers to create their own informative, funny, or shocking content, which can then be passed around in an instant. Today’s digital users love a quick video, and they really don’t care whether it’s user-generated or branded, as long as they find it entertaining.

Creating Great Video Content

So how can you create video content which brings your business message to life? And what tools can you use without breaking the bank?

Below are four standby techniques for creating great video content for a dental online marketing campaign:

1. Know Your Audience – First and foremost, know your audience! Always give the audience information that they want or need.

2. Impress – One key to video success is the ability to grab the attention of the viewer within the first ten seconds. To do this, try images or facts that surprise. Present a question that your viewers will want the answer to, and then give them the answer.

3. Use Humor – Using humor is a fantastic way to engage customers in a positive way. Happy customers will have no qualms associating with your business, and it will make them feel like passing along your information to their friends and family.

4. Be Real – Unless your video is shot by a professional, don’t worry about being a bit imperfect. Don’t over-edit your video and cut out every single imperfection. Being real and honest is always the best route.

Tools for Creating Video Content

These days, you don’t have to use state-of-the-art or high-end equipment to create a great video. You can easily take a video on your smartphone and upload it to the web almost intstantly!

YouTube Editor – A must have for YouTube users. YouTube Editor has some nifty tools and features built-in such as adding notes or transcripts and making videos SEO friendly. Best of all? It’s completely free!

Magisto – A free app for iPhone and Android, this software uses artificial intelligence to edit your videos. Simply upload raw footage and the software will choose the best pieces and create a video. You can also add music, titles and more.

Recently released polls and statistics are making it clear that video content is critical to online marketing. You can’t afford to ignore this opportunity when making your dental marketing plan. Whether you choose to do an informational webinar, personal video bios of your staff and office, or you create hilarious commercials, creating engaging videos can be fun for you and your audience.

Author: eDentalImage

Courtesy of www.edentalimage.com

We all know you can save 15 percent or more on car insurance. Why? Because a talking gecko told us so.

It’s also common knowledge nobody better lay a finger on Bart Simpson’s Butterfinger, the Energizer Bunny keeps going and going, polar bears love Coca-Cola, and “Trix are for kids” (not some silly rabbit).

Why do we know these things? Animation.

Animation is a powerful tool and motivator, whether it’s being leveraged to sell more cereal, raking in cash at the box office and winning Academy Awards, or informing millions of people of a global crisis that’s going unnoticed.

Most people see animation as this thing that lives on TV, the movies or YouTube. But why can’t it live on your website? Why can’t you be utilizing and leveraging this powerful medium for your business?

You can.

I’ll give you five reasons why you should be using animation in your marketing efforts (caution, samples may contain adult language).

1. Entertainment & Memorability

There’s a reason everyone knows how Cee Lo Green is feeling about his ex-girlfriend.

[Warning: NSFW due to explicit language]

The music video for his F*ck You song has more than 10.7 million views on YouTube and consists entirely of motion graphics (kinetic text, to be more precise).

Not only is this piece entertaining, it is literally feeding you the information both visually and aurally. After hearing the first chorus, you can’t help but sing along the next time around. For me, this video has been referenced by more friends, family and even clients than probably necessary, which goes to show just how memorable it is (and transcending, which we’ll get to later).

This piece we teamed up with Catseye Pest Control to create starts off with 100 percent 3D computer animation for the first 30 seconds, then switches to live-action with 3D integration.

Catseye | :60 Jingle 2012 from O Studios on Vimeo.

The goal for this spot was to create an entertaining and memorable piece that introduces and showcases the company’s new cast of heroes and villains.

2. Visual & Emotional Stimulation

If you want to blab on for a couple of minutes about a certain topic, product or service, what better way to keep your audience engaged than with a visually and/or emotionally stimulating motion graphics piece or animation?

Take, for example, Fraser Davidson’s motion piece “Bill Maher – Irritable Bowl Syndrome”, a short essay animated from a recording by Bill Maher. . It’s a visually–stimulating, highly-engaging piece (not to mention entertaining and memorable) with more than 200,000 views on Vimeo alone.

Bill Maher – Irritable Bowl Syndrome from Fraser Davidson on Vimeo.

Perhaps you don’t want a voice at all… If a picture is worth a thousand words, then how much is an animated sequence worth? This is a piece we produced for BESTPASS to visually explain their business in a fun and upbeat way.

Best Pass | Ident + Tradeshow Loop from O Studios on Vimeo.

3. Supplemental Professionalism

Sometimes called the “wow” factor – nothing says “professionalism” better than a really killer animated piece that speaks to your business. For an example, take a look at Good Books’ “Metamorphosis” piece produced by Buck.

Good Books – Metamorphosis from Buck on Vimeo.

Described as the “graphic equivalent of a drug fueled rant”, it currently has more than 300,000 views on Vimeo. Before seeing this animation, I had no idea who Good Books was, let alone, they even existed. This animation put them on the map, for me and, I’d imagine, at least 290,000 or so others. Upon viewing, you instantly think, “clearly they have their shit together”.

4. Brand Expansion & Market Transcendence

Want to see your brand explode beyond its traditional box and reach an audience exponentially larger than your current one? Nothing does that faster and more effectively than a properly produced video.

Think about when Hellmann’s put together this piece as part of the Eat Real Local campaign.

Hellmann’s – It’s Time for Real from CRUSH on Vimeo.

It was such a powerful use of animation in marketing that is transcended Hellmann’s out of its mayonnaise box and brought them to the forefront of the conversation around sustainable living simply because the video was shared by so many people. It gave Hellmann’s an entirely new platform and context to share material. That’s what good content does. It makes you part of a larger conversation.

The Hellmann’s example also serves as an excellent reminder that the content you’re creating doesn’t always have to fit squarely in your target audience. Sometimes stepping outside of your comfort zone and doing something that is only tangentially related to your business, or not at all related, expands the trust of your brand.

5. Why The Hell Not?

Honestly, what have you got to lose? I’m sure there’s plenty of stuff you’ve blown cash on that barely made a splash in the puddle next to the pond you were trying to reach. Sure, it may seem like an expensive and/or time consuming endeavor up front, but the value it creates for the company, the brand and its effect on your business are well worth it. There’s nothing better than people searching the Web for your commercial or company overview just to show another person how cool or informative it is. Isn’t that what this “content marketing revolution” is all about?

And who do you think will pop into their heads the next time they have a need for the product or service you offer? Top-of-mind awareness is invaluable in this day and age of market floods, ADD-laden media barrages and the vast ocean of digital storefronts and webhomes clamoring for the top search engine results spot.

Like Nike says; Just Do It.

NIKE SPORTSWEAR: NSW+FBGT from fla on Vimeo.

Author: Lawrence Basso

Courtesy of www.overit.com

How do you develop a brand on YouTube? It definitely takes more than just an awesome logo. Why is branding important? You want to give people something familiar and recognizable in which to attach your content so that viewers will likely want to check out all of your other videos and ones you upload in the future. It makes you easier to find, and trust. Our own Tim Schmoyer went over to the VidiSEO channel to discuss 8 ways to brand your channel. The tips he gives are excellent, so you should pay attention if branding is something you’re curious about.

8 Steps to Branding Your Channel on YouTube

Let’s give the floor to Mark Ballek of VidiSEO and Tim Schmoyer:

OK, so let’s review what we’ve learned from this video:

1. Upload A Quality Avatar

Almost everything you do on YouTube will be accompanied by this avatar. If you subscribe to channels and the kind of person who likes to see all of that channel’s activity, you’ll see that avatar when they like, favorite, share, subscribe, comment…you know, everything. So you want to pick one that not only looks awesome and would compel people to click on it, but something that looks good even when it’s really small, which is likely when it comes to your activity on YouTube.

2. Watermark Your Videos

This is your logo, usually found in the corner of the screen, and as Tim suggests, “at 60% opacity.” That way it will be an ever-present reinforcement of your brand on the video, while not being in the way of your content.

3. Mention Your Channel Name

In the first 15 seconds, be sure to find a way to mention your channel name. “Hello, welcome to [insert channel name here]” is going to be a common one. It’s a verbal reinforcement of your brand and helps people remember it and associate your content with it.

4. Brand Your Channel Page

Over on the sidebar of your channel page, you should have all of your social media links. The page should have your logo in the background image somewhere. Also, take the time to give a succinct description so that people can tell who you are and what you’re about, and not so long that it would be cut off and they would have to click to see more.

5. Add A Brand Tag to Videos

When you upload a video, you’ll be putting tags that describe the contents so that they can be found in search. But you also want to put a “brand” tag at the end. While tags at the end of a series of tags are not given as much weight, what they will do is give YouTube a frame of reference so that your videos show up in the “Related Videos” section while people watch your content, and not some other channels’.

6. Branded Intro Bumper

Place a video bumper no longer than 5 seconds at the beginning of the video somewhere, either right at the beginning or right after your intro. This is more visual reinforcement of your brand and you can make these look pretty cool with simple graphics and sound. But don’t make them too long or people will start leaving your videos en masse.

7. Branded End Slate

At the end of most popular channels’ videos you will see a whole bunch of links and previews of other videos that people can click and watch. Throw your logo in the background somewhere, and now you’re associating this content with other content people might enjoy, all the while reminding them, “Hey, this channel, this brand, is awesome. Watch more.”

8. Turn Off Channel Ads

It might seem counter-intuitive but this would be for your channel page only. Taking ads off of that ensures that when people visit your channel page that they are seeing just you and only you, and not a whole bunch of unrelated images that might confuse them.

Author: Chris Atkinson

Courtesy of www.reelseo.com

Videos are certainly the most suitable contents for websites today. Even a decade back, videos were considered as entertaining contents; whereas, today, general businesses are effectively using video marketing strategies for generating leads and promote business deals. Marketing experts have been studying the changes and evolution in search engine algorithms since the beginning. Especially after Google panda and penguin updates, things have changed significantly.

Today, SEO experts and internet marketers consider video marketing to be the most powerful strategy to increase the number of visitors and enhance business prospect effectively. Let’s explore why videos are important for SEO and social media strategy.

How proper video optimizing and integration boosts SERPs and social media credibility:

Longer click through rates and lower bounce rates

Recently Google has introduced artificial intelligence to their ranking algorithm.The intelligent search engine robots analyze the length of click through rates and lower bounce rates. Websites that have lower bounce rates and longer click through rates are considered as credible resources where the visitors are staying longer. The search engines consider these websites to be useful and reliable and hence they mostly reach the top search engine positions. A study shows that a static website has 53 times more chances of ranking among the top 10?s when a video is synced with the text or image content.

Better interactions, audience-responses and productive discussions

Texts are mostly considered as information initiating less interactions and user discussions. Experts have defined social content and plain text content distinctly. Videos often attract visitors and keep them engaged at the site. Videos successfully result in better interactions, direct responses, reviews and direct discussions on the site. These together produce supportive contents and enhance credibility of a website. When a website has automated and organic content generation system, it attains a higher level of credibility and reliability. Top search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing consider these on-site interactions to be a vital detection test to find out authority website in a specific niche.

TLDR issues and importance of engaging content

Too Long Don’t Read- this is a common problem for many resourceful and reliable sites today. Internet has become a great resource for attaining information for the people. But the users are more attracted towards catchy, interesting and amusing contents. Plain texts are certainly considered as the most popular and ancient way of collecting information; but videos, images and audios are always effective for spreading information. Video content based communications are much effective than other formats. That’s a reason many leading info-based sites have started using audiovisual contents side by side. These integrations make their contents more reachable to a huge audience-platform.

“Videos are social content” – Dave Evans (social media marketing expert)

Social media sharing has become an effective way of driving traffic and earning credibility. A website owner must have a well-built social profile for his web business. Images, audios and most important videos are the contents that can bring huge traffic from social media websites like facebook.com, twitter.com etc. High quality, engaging videos are capable of creating amazing social buzz about anything on this earth. Social media marketing expert Dave Evans says videos are the most powerful and engaging social contents among all. Credible social presence automatically builds a referral traffic base and hence increase search engine rankings and business operations online.

Mass linking, going viral and organic sharing

Recently the search engines have introduced some changes in the ranking algorithms. Mass marketing, owner based marketing or rapid linking is considered as spamming activities. These fraudulence significantly damage website reputation. But social websites allow you to go viral without damaging your site reputation and credibility. Automated mass linking by your visitors from around the world adds credibility to your website. The videos mostly go viral if they’re attractive enough to create public buzz. As a whole, videos undergo massive organic sharing that ultimately leads to referral visitors, returning visitors and liable customers for your business online.

There are many other reasons why the webmasters are focusing on video as their main content types. Even the websites that used to upload plain text exclusively and considered as most reliable resources in certain niches are also adding videos side by side. Websites like Wikipedia.com, wikihow.com, hubpages.com are also considering audiovisual contents essential with the text contents. Actions from their end, their encouraging attitude clearly prove how videos have become vital concerns for attaining better SERPs and visibility.

Author: Shivbhadra Gohil

Courtesy of www.shivblog.com

YouTube isn’t very complicated. It’s all about thinking what will my audience click… while they are at work. That is the key. If you want a video to go viral that takes work, but the first step is putting up images and title that are not offensive. If it can be watched at work it can be sent to anyone and that is what can go viral. Did you click my image? Why? Because of its Title?

YouTube marketing is a free service and anyone or any business can have a free YouTube channel. To get a YouTube channel all you will need to do is create an ID and find or borrow a digital camera to upload your video. Here are the top 10 tips to to follow to boost your video views online.

Here are the 10 steps to follow:

1. Research keywords related to your content and find popular YouTube videos

2. Use the keyword and title tags from the popular videos and copy them into your video.

3. Find relevant channels in YouTube and subscribe to them.

4. Create a description that begins and ends with your URL

5. Repeat the most important keywords in your description at least 4-5 times each

6. Get friends, family and co-workers to rate and favorite your videos

7. Have a few friends view your new video and comment on your video – This is important because it is always hardest to get the first comments on a video. Nobody wants to be the first one to post a comment.

8. Use YouTube to send out friend requests or use software to do it for you

9. Respond to other relevant videos that use similar keywords

10. Make comments on relevant videos

Author: MarkRuttan

Courtesy of www.semtrak.com

Video is one of the most powerful ways to engage your audience online, whether you’re running a huge multi-national corporation or a small business employing just a few staff. In fact, more small businesses than ever are choosing to include videos on their websites as they realise that video is becoming an integral part of online marketing.

Of course, another big part of marketing a business online is SEO. Most small business owners realise the benefits of SEO these days and the good news is that video and SEO go hand-in-hand.

The thing is, like any other form of content (text, images, etc.), video has to be optimised in order to bring SEO benefits – and a lot of small business owners tend to neglect this optimisation.

So, with the aim of getting your online videos to rank better for your keywords this year, here are four essential (and easy!) tips for optimising your video content:

1. Include written content

When video content is placed on a website, all too often it is placed on a page that doesn’t have much written text. Of course, video is much more engaging than text, so for the majority of your site’s visitors this shouldn’t be much of a problem.

However, the problem with neglecting text on your video content pages is that search engines are unable to read the content of that video – and therefore they are unable to determine the topic of your page and unable to rank it accordingly.

What’s the solution? All you need to do to solve this problem is to place at least some relevant written text on the page that also has your video embedded on it. One of the easiest ways to do this is to offer a video transcription (a written version of the dialogue spoken in the video), either verbatim or paraphrased. (Heather Lloyd-Martin discusses this very solution in her SEO Copywriting post, “When video content means bad news for your site”).

Incorporating written content will not only allow Google and other search engines to determine the nature of your page, but it will also allow visitors to choose whether they want to watch the video or read the transcription/text.

2. Don’t neglect basic SEO

Just because your content is in a video format doesn’t mean that the basic SEO rules should be neglected. Unfortunately, this is something that occurs quite frequently. If you’re neglecting basic SEO, chances are that your video content isn’t going to get seen by as many people as you might wish.

What’s the solution? Make sure that you optimise title tags, headings, URL’s and written content even on pages with video embeds. You still need to do your keyword research!

3. Submit a video sitemap

Google (and other search engines) aren’t going to know that you’ve embedded an engaging, informative video on your site unless you specifically tell them, and neither are potential visitors. By neglecting to submit a video sitemap to the search engines, there is no way they can “see” your video content and therefore, they can’t let potential visitors know that you have video content on your site either.

What’s the solution? Simple: submit a video sitemap to Google and other search engines. Doing this is free and will tell Google that you have video on your site and what it’s about. It’ll also bring the possibility of a video thumbnail showing up in the SERP’s for your chosen keywords. Although this doesn’t directly affect rankings, it can hugely affect click through rates which can bring more visitors to your website.

4. Provide a video embed code

If you’ve gone to the effort of creating an exceptional video then it’s likely that people are going to want to share it on the web. People may want to embed the video on their own website and share it with their audience, which is great! The problem is that if you don’t control how they do this, it is likely that you won’t get the credit for the video or any SEO benefits (which is not good considering how long it took you to create the video).

What’s the solution? As we all know, inbound links are a huge part of SEO and by providing an embed code on your video content page, you can allow people to embed the video on their own website and to give you credit in the form of a nice, juicy link.

How do you do this? Well, you provide an embed code that can be copied and pasted to allow visitors to embed the video on their own site. In the embed code, include a link back to your site/content so that when they embed the video, credit is automatically given to you in the form of a link. The great thing about this is that you can make it easy for your video to be shared, get links, and control the anchor text. It’s a win-win solution!

It’s a wrap!

With video being one of the most popular types of online content, you’ve already made the extremely wise decision to integrate video into your online marketing strategy…so make sure Google knows just how great your content is!

Following these four simple optimisation tips should help improve your site or blog’s rankings, as well as expose your video to a wider audience.

Author: Joshua Hardwick

Courtesy of www.seocopywriting.com

A new service called Blogican (Blog I Can) coming out in January of 2013. We will offer a full range of services for bloggers of all levels:

• WordPress blogs installation and setup along with professional themes and plugins
• Blog maintainance – wordpress, plugins and themes recurring updates.
• Blogging optimized professional hosting
• Original human written niche articles auto posted to your blog on monthly basis.
• Niche related affiliate products with your affiliate ID posted to your blog.
• Niche related videos posted to your blog.
• Blog monetization in the form of banners, google ads and contextual links.
• And much more…

Sign up for the early bird list here.

This is the first time we have an opportunity to address you with our Christmas greetings.

We are really thankful for your contribution to our new service.

Hope we justified your expectations and provided you with excellent video production service.

We will be waiting for you in the next year with more cool and striking ideas and projects.

New categories and templates will be added soon to satisfy your demands and inspire you for new ideas and concepts.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!!!

Similar to television advertising, the most effective lengths for in-stream online video ads are 15 and 30-second spots. However, the advantage online video advertising has over TV is that it can be delivered in the form of a pre-roll video ad targeted and personally relevant to a consumer based on his individual shopping behavior.

The marriage of retargeting and video advertising is a match made in marketing heaven. With the help of pre-roll video ads, brands are able to interact with and convert consumers on a deeper, more intimate level, as the ad content is tailored to the viewer based on previous website actions. These engaging video ad experiences also increase site traffic and foster brand loyalty as shoppers visit the site more frequently.

Now that you understand why targeted pre-roll video ads are beneficial to online brands, let’s explore when to use a 15-second versus 30-second video ad to aquire customers.

15-Second Video Ads for Repeat Customers

How to Use 15 Second vs. 30 Second Pre Roll Video Ads for Ecommerce Retargeting“Shop-a-lot” customers have a high impression value because they visit your site and purchase more frequently than any other segment of customer, such as first-time buyers or non-customers. Therefore, a 15-second ad is enough to re-engage the repeat customer, either by showcasing the last product viewed or a related item of a recent purchase.

Let’s use Mrs. Baker as an example. Mrs. Baker spends a good portion of her day in the kitchen, and therefore, spends another large portion of her time on the hunt for new supplies and cooking devices. Having visited your site more than once, Mrs. Baker knows her way around your product pages and already has an idea of what she is looking for before even typing in the URL. She doesn’t require a song and dance to make a purchase; she might need 15-seconds or so to be attracted to a new product or a familiar item. These high-value shoppers are also more inclined to subscribe to a one-click checkout option.

Since a shop-a-lot customer is familiar with your brand, you can save those extra 15-seconds for a prospect that is not.

Use 30-Second Video Ads for Visitors and First-Time Buyers

30 Second Video Ads resized 600 200×187 How to Use 15 Second vs. 30 Second Pre Roll Video Ads for Ecommerce RetargetingThese customers have a lower impression value because they are less familiar with your brand and thus, less likely to convert. On the contrary; first-time buyers are more likely to abandon ship, or shopping cart, than they are to become loyal customers. Whether it is a prospect browsing your site, or a non-committal shopper abandoning his cart, target them with a 30-second ad to deliver your brand message, the last product viewed and perhaps a promo code, to drive them back to your site and make that purchase.

Remember Mrs. Baker from earlier? Well, this time, she is on the hunt for office supplies, something she doesn’t browse for as frequently. So she bounces around from site to site, comparing prices and spending more time reading product descriptions. Since she does not visit the office supply site as frequently as a high-value shopper, such as an office manager, she takes more time to browse the goods in order to become more familiar with the catalog. Enter a longer, more engaging and impactful, 30-second video ad to engage Mrs. Baker and encourage her to make a more well-informed purchase.

It’s simple, really. Today online shoppers have a stronger hand in the marketing thumb war between brand and consumer. Whether it is a frequent shopper or a first-time visitor, every shopper will approach an online site with a selective hand. Retargeted pre-roll ads present each individual consumer with what they want, when they want it, and use the video length best suited for each targeted shopper.

Author: Kelly Ford

Courtesy of www.reelseo.com