Of course, we should all know by now the power of video marketing. In a day and age where people are less inclined to sit and read a book or text from a website, rather they would learn more from a medium that is more engaging such as video. Having said that, it is a vital part of any SEO campaign to ensure that you create videos to market across the video streaming platform. Websites such as YouTube, Vimeo, and Viddler all attract large amounts of attention, and can also return good results in the search engines.

It is a common misconception in the webmaster world that you can simply build something, and people will come in droves. This is most certainly not true, unlike a shop front which is built in your local town which doesn’t rely on search engines, a website is simply hidden until a user is directed to it. Keyword optimization, off page SEO, all of these things are an influencing factor in how well our websites rank in the search engines, however certain off page methods also require similar attention.

Pointer One – Video length and content

Stating the obvious, video creation will always be your first step. At this point, you need to think of the average user, what length video do they want to watch? What kind of content are they after? What can you add to the video in order to draw attention back to your main site? Personally, I find that the average user will not want to watch the full length of a video more than five minutes long, any longer than this, you will find that users will skim through content and not get the most out of it. Of course, the shorter and more catchy is always better. A few brief guidelines that I like to follow when creating videos:

1. Make sure that the viewer knows who I am before they get into the main content
2. Give the viewer some compelling content that is unique to you and not copied. Make it short enough to keep their attention (Preferably under 3 – 5 minutes)
3. Ask a compelling open question that inspires a lot of thought, and a desire to know the answer
4. Tell them where to go to see more

As long as I follow these points, I can always be guaranteed that a large majority of those who view my videos will be compelled enough to visit my website for more information, read more than three pages on site, and maybe even sign up to my mailing list. The only other thing that will demand your attention from here is how to market that video to the masses.

Pointer Two – Keyword Optimization

Of course, we are going to need to apply some SEO for our video marketing, if we would like our videos to be discoverable that is. Creating great titles with SEO in mind is one thing (detailed in this SEO Writing Post) but strategies for keyword optimization in videos can take on a different shape. Let me explain…

In Google organic results, there will always be a listing of YouTube videos relating to your query, which means of course that if you optimize your videos properly using the right keywords, you will easily, and quickly receive free organic listings for your video. The key here is to work with keywords that receive traffic, and that don’t have organic listings for video in Google already. For this, keyword research can be done using a combination of the search engines itself to check if video content is listed for a particular keyword, and the Google Keyword tool. Your best keyword is always going to be the one that receives the highest number of queries that is not returning video results in Google.

Video optimization is quite easy, with a little research and understanding, you too can rank high in Google with organic video results. Before reading this, were you aware of the power of video marketing? If the answer is no, then I think that you have some videos to create and market!