A Quick Guide To Optimizing Your Online Marketing Videos for Search

Videos and mobile are the up and coming marketing venues as 2013 fast approaches.

While both are a great business opportunity, marketing videos are an excellent way to augment your business’s online marketing strategy.

Rich content like video contributes to your website’s quality and engages your audience more effectively than simple text.

The relative newness of video as an online marketing tool, however, means that search engines aren’t as efficient at crawling your video content. You need to do some extra work to make your videos appear in search listings and gain popularity.

Do the Extra Work

It’s easy to embed video into your website or blog, but without extra effort, it’s just empty space from a Google bot’s point of view. Bots read your internal links, keywords, and content in order to rank your website in its listings.

If you don’t utilize the Video Sitemap, you can’t benefit from your video’s SEO capabilities, and potential customers won’t be able to find your content on Google Video.

• Your Video Sitemap gives the Google bots everything they need in order to parse your video’s qualities easily and effectively. When you embed your video on your website, include the original location of your video in the code so that Google can see where the video originally came from.

• Your keywords should not only be prevalent on your website and within your content, but also in your video’s tags. These include the title tag, description tag, thumbnail_loc, and video tag.

Give the Engines a Boost

Google and Bing’s search engines were engineered to read text. The process of re-engineering the bots to locate, crawl and judge video is still going on. For now, you can’t rely on organic traffic to bring people to your video – you need to actively submit your video sitemap to the search engines.

• Bing currently only accepts video sitemap submissions through email, and their process makes it difficult to tell whether or not your email has been received and processed. Until Bing gets its act together, you’re better off not wasting your time with their process.

• Google, on the other hand, allows you to submit your Video Sitemap the same way you would submit your website. There’s a limit of 50,000 entries on the sitemap, but you’re allowed to put multiple videos all on one.

Experiment!

Chances are that you’re new to the entire process of making and embedding online marketing videos on your website. Even if you have some experience in this method, it’s still wise to take it slow. As with any other marketing campaign, you need to continually experiment with your videos and assess their impact on your audience.

• Learn how long it takes you to shoot, edit, and upload a video before you put a lot of your budget into the process. You can start with tutorials or employee interviews that are only a couple minutes in length. As you get used to the process, you’ll get an idea of what kind of time investment it takes to create a quality video.

• Share your videos on your social media platforms, website, and email blasts. Assess which videos gain the most views and shares and concentrate on replicating their style and subject matter in future videos. This process is essential to finding out what your fans find most engaging and attractive.

• Create sitemaps for your videos from the very beginning. You don’t want to have to go back in later to optimize them for web search.

Engaging, interesting video content is an important element of your website, as well as your business’s entire online presence. The key to marketing with online videos is to create quality content that is optimized for web search.

Megan Webb-Morgan is a web content writer for, B2B lead generation resource, Resource Nation. She writes about small business, focusing on topics such as online marketing for startups. Follow Resource Nation on Facebook and Google+, too!