Today, Mark Rotblat from TubeMogul did an interesting video about video SEO. First off, I’m glad to see a video service provider videoblogging; that makes more sense. Yesterday, I wrote about Youtube’s deep linking and how this feature could affect rankings in the video search engine. Video consumption online is making a shift from traditional search to discovery. The video space has now reached a point of high saturation, and the user wants to be told where to look at. FFWD is a great example of how this new trend is taking shape.
Tagging is good for indexing your video properly. However, in their video recommendation algorithms, video platforms will tend to favor popular videos. It simply makes more sense to suggest something that has attracted the attention of many others, than suggesting some content lost in an ocean of videos. Popularity is measured with those variables: stars, favorites, comments, shared, emailed, embedded, re-blogged, … Those variables indicate if a video is hot or not.
Here are a few additional tips to build your video audience online:
- Use Tubemogul to find the video platform where your videos get the most views.
- Adopt one of those communities, and become a power user in this community.
- Find a trick to boost video views upon launch: Views attract more views.
- Always leave a trace behind a video you watched (even if it’s a 1 star rating).
- Find a trick to get more channel views as well, to show that you’re popular.
- If you are on Youtube, please do use annotations to link to your other videos, and make those annotations attractive. That, in my opinion, is the new SEO strategy on Youtube.
- Create a blog where you re-blog all of the vids you like, and make sure to include yours in the process.
- Stop using TubeMogul to duplicate your content on a maximum of video platforms. It slowly kills the communities of all the platforms where you are not socially active.
- Blogs are still the best buddies to search engines. Embed your videos in articles, this adds some metadata around the vid.
- Experiment. There are a lot of new tricks to be found around videos. I will be releasing some cool new stuff in a few weeks, just for the fun of creating new ways to interact around a video.
- Add value, as much as you can, in and around your video.