- by Judd Lyon
- Aug 11, 2008
- Filed in: Austin news & notes
The Austin Internet Marketing Meetup for August was held this past Wednesday, this time at the Millwood Library instead of Texpresso. While the group was less-caffeinated (and hence chatty) than usual, it was still a worthwhile meeting. The topic of this month's session was SEO for Video, and the group organizers Laura and Adam Alter came through yet again with an interesting and well-rounded presentation. You can check out the slide deck of the presentation Video SEO and Video Marketing on Laura's blog (while you're at it, you should go vote for her SXSW ‘09 panel which also has to do with video marketing).
Even though video has exploded onto the scene in the last couple years due to advancements in storage and delivery, video SEO is still about the basics. Take care of your page titles, meta descriptions, video names, file names, tags, and surrounding HTML and you're pretty much there. Laura cited a great source for video SEO tips called Reel SEO, which has a great video SEO guide. Also worth checking out is the video search engine Blinkx' white paper on video SEO, available for download here (PDF).
Production
One of the points of emphasis in the meeting was that video is a great vehicle to spread your brand's message, and you don't have to break the bank doing it. As a proof of concept, we shot a quick vid there on the spot with a cell phone using the service quik.com (which is sorta scary in its immediacy). We then edited it and added titles using Windows Movie Maker. While the quick-and-dirty route won't win you an academy award, for most small businesses it serves its purpose just fine. If you're the DIY type, check the last slide of the presentation for a list of stock services which let you assemble ready-made footage with your own to create affordable vids.
Distribution
While it may be tempting to create your own video player (see FlowPlayer in the resources below), you'd be better off using somebody else's bandwidth like YouTube or (my personal fav Vimeo). Not only do you not have to worry about the overhead, but you can also get additional exposure using these channels. Embed the video and write up a good HTML description on your site and you can have it both ways. For those of you who really need to get your videos out there, check out TubeMogul, which aggregates your video accounts, enabling you to upload once but publish to several places. I learned of another similar service at the meeting called Vidmetrix, which also looks interesting.
Video Sitemaps and Media RSS
After the meeting I got to thinking about a couple of fairly recent technologies that I've been looking into for a client (how-to video site MindBites.com): video sitemaps and MRSS.
Google Video Sitemaps
Google announced in late 2007 a variation of the XML sitemaps protocol that includes additional meta-data about your video. So far only Google supports video sitemaps, as it helps them index and organize video for their video search engine as well the blended or “universal” results. Here's how you can create a video sitemap.
Media RSS (MRSS)
Yahoo on the other hand, encourages the use of Media RSS, which as you would expect is an RSS-feed with additional fields for video information. MRSS has been in use for a little while now and is not too hard to implement. You can read all about it at Yahoo's MRSS FAQ. The reincarnated WebMonkey also has a tutorial on MRSS.
Conclusion
Video SEO is in its infancy, right now everybody is experimenting. You can bet that the video phenomenon isn't going anywhere soon, we all should learn as much as we can about creating, distributing, and marketing our vids.
Resources
Here's a few video-related links for your viewing pleasure:
- ReelSEO.com
- MediaRSS FAQ at Yahoo
- Google Video Sitemaps
- FlowPlayer – open-source and skinnable Flash video player
- I Show U (Mac) – screencasting made easy (check out their other software too)
- Jing (Mac & PC) – relatively new (and free) screencasting service from TechSmith
- iSquint (Mac) – convert and output iPod-ready video files
- Silverback - records usability testing sessions, see my Silverback review here
- Viral Video Chart – tracks the latest viral videos (just found out about this at the meeting)
- Blinkx Video SEO White paper (PDF) - video SEO report from video search engine Blinkx
- Video Sitemap Generator Script &ndash (written in C#, requires some programming chops)
- VidMetrix – posting aggregator similar to TubeMogul
- Qik – stream video live from your phone
- iMovie Tutorials &ndash Apple's official docs
- Windows Movie Maker Tutorials – via Microsoft.com
About the author
Judd Lyon is the Principal of TRIF3CTA, a web design and Internet marketing company in Austin, Texas.
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