Driven by the increasing availability of broadband and the shift toward digital media, video on the internet has become the hottest craze of today. We have witnessed unprecedented surge of traffic towards online video. The word "Video" is searched over 20,000 times per day on search engines, without counting the direct traffic that sites like YouTube and Google Video receive.
After Google, YouTube is now the second-largest search engine on the web with 350 million unique viewers each month. Perhaps not surprisingly, online video is surely becoming the preferred media mode.
As the online users apparently spend a great part of their time online watching videos, you should consider taking advantage of this trend by properly optimizing and promoting your videos in order to increase your website's traffic and brand awareness. Videos can undeniably be a great way to expose your brand to users who may have otherwise not been familiar with the products and services you offer.
As online video optimization is becoming a must, we have put together a few best practices that you should consider when looking to optimize your video.
Create compelling video
It is highly recommendable the video you create to appeal to your audience. If the story is not compelling, then the users will not flock to watch the video and it won’t go viral; two key elements in driving traffic to your site.
Also, try not to repeat the plot of other videos optimizing for your target keyword terms. Instead, find a fresh content space.
From a brand perspective, the video should be useful and informative. Videos that are not related to your brand or services will just confuse your audience.
Give your video a Captivating Title
In fact, the title is the most important element because it is the biggest factor in grabbing users’ attention and convincing them to view the video. If you don’t instantly intrigue, excite or inspire your audience, they’re unlikely to watch it.
It is also advisable to give your video a keyword rich title that is relevant to your services, products, or brand.
Optimize your video for relevant keywords
Conducting a keyword research for your video content is not an easy task. After putting together a keyword list, make sure the audience is already searching for your targeted terms. If not, find the closest related terms being searched. You should also research for videos with the highest performances in views and ratings to get an idea what your audience like most.
After making your final choice, use the keywords in the filename and URL. Video search engines put a fair amount of weight on these.
Build a unique page
Create a content-rich page for the video you are promoting. Along with appropriate Meta data, if you want your video to rank well, it should be surrounded with descriptive text and keyword rich links to help get indexed by the search engines. The video's title and description are heavily weighted by the search engines. That is why they have to be used wisely.
Keep Your Videos to not longer than five minutes
Online users are more likely to watch short clips (3-5 minutes) instead of longer ones. For that reason, it is important to keep the length reasonable.
If your video content is too long, create short clips from your longer version. Thus, you will not only satisfy the expectations of the users, but it will also keep them looking for more.
Create a video site map
If you want users and search engine spiders to find your video content easily, than build a video sitemap on your site. List all the videos in your website, along with metadata of the video. After creating a video site map, you should submit it by logging into Google Webmaster tools.
Tag Your Videos
Tag your videos with the selected keywords. Don’t over tag.
Brand the video with the company’s logo
Video is a great way to build brand awareness with your prospects. For that purpose, develop videos that reinforce the message of your brand and afterwards incorporate your brand in it. Also, put a backlink pointing to the original video on your site, to a longer version of the same video, or to your video archive page.
Let Users Rate your Video
Not only will search engines pay attention to the ratings when ranking videos, but they are also a crucial part of "going viral", as potential viewers are very attracted to highly ranked videos.
Tips for promoting your video
1. Proliferate your content on the video engines. For greater exposure, put your video everywhere. You should consider submitting your video to Blinks. If you want to upload your video to several video sites at once than use TubeMogul.com.
2. Use the thumbnails to help users choose which video to watch. Users tend to watch a quick snapshot in order to decide whether to invest time in watching the entire video. The way you generate thumbnails differs from site to site, but it's definitely worth it to go through the process for each site you upload to. It's an important factor to get people to view the video.
3. Make a good use of social bookmarking services. They will contribute to the easier distribution and help in visibility of the videos. Social bookmarking sites will certainly assist in your effort to go viral.
4. Offer the option to embed your video in other people's sites. This will really encourage people to spread your video.
5. Put a send to a friend option at the end of the video.
