Video Search, Video Discovery, and Video SEO

VIDEO SEOTHE “REEL” STORY ON GETTING

YOUR ONLINE VIDEO DISCOVERED

Video Search - Background

Video Search Engine Indexing

Video Search Engine Indices Largely Text Based– In File Metadata – Filename, etc..

– Surrounding page text

– Social tagging

– Closed captions

– Transcripts, Etc…

Advanced Video Analysis Technologies– Automatic speech to text recognition (ASR)

– Optical character recognition (OCR) – scene text

– Object recognition & concept detection

– Facial recognition

– Scene detection

– Audio analysis

Video Search Engine Indexing Methods

Problems with video retrieval mechanisms are evident:• Not YET able to “understand” video content – metadata reliance

• Keyword-based searches with semantic expansion somewhat restricted

• Advanced mechanisms are nascent and insufficient:– Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR)

• Only relevant if spoken word exists

• Applies mostly to English video files

• Audio quality - (e.g. field interviews)

– Concept detection• Only as good as what goes in - quality

• Metadata creation takes time & effort– hint – leverage automation in conjunction with human intervention

What does this mean?• Search engines need to be told what a video is about

• Optimization is crucial to discovery, indexing, and ranking

Video Search Indexing - Issues

Video Search Engines– All depend primarily on file metadata & on-page text

content

– Automatic speech to text recognition (Google, Blinkx)

– Object recognition & concept detection (Google)

– Facial recognition (Videosurf)

Meta Search– Aggregation of content from multiple sources (Most

video search engines have moved in this direction)

General Search Engines– Universal search, federated, blended, etc…

Video Destination Sites– YouTube, Metacafe, blip TV, and many many more…

Video Search – The Players

May 2007 - Google’s Universal Search • Google Launches Universal Search initiative to integrate listings from its news, video,

images, local & book search engines into Google SERPS

July 2008 - Adobe Partners with Google & Yahoo

December 2008 - YouTube = Major Search Engine• YouTube becomes the 2nd largest search engine in terms of pure search queries

• Beats Yahoo for first time

Important Search Industry Trends

“Unlike HTML code used on Web sites &found by search engines, rich media today is opaque,” said Mark Randall, chief strategist of the

company’s dynamic media group. “We want to make it more discoverable.”

Video Search – Trends in Discovery

Searches for Video– 38% of all US online users report using search engine results to discover video 1

• Vs. from a portal (19%)

• Vs other video destination sites (11%)

YouTube Searching– 54% of online consumers reported using the site to discover video 1

– June 2009 – 3.6 Billion search queries, 27% of all Google queries & second largest search engine 2

Search Engine Referral Traffic– Share of video referral traffic from search engines 3

• 11.18% - general search engines (Youtube excluded)

• 0.63% - video search engines (e.g. blinkx, truveo, etc…)

Sources: 1JupiterResearch/NPD Group Individual User Survey (6/08) | 2 Comscore Search Rankings (6/09) | 3Tubemogul (2/09)

Video Search Discovery Trends

Category

% of category traffic from

search engines 4/09

% ∆ in share of traffic from

search engines 4/08-7/09

% of category traffic from

Google4/09

% ∆ in share of traffic from

Google 4/08 – 4/09

Health & Medical 46.29% 1% 33.88% 10%

Travel 36.82% 8% 27.91% 20%

Shopping & Classifieds 24.04% -5% 17.28% 4%

News & Media 21.35% -2% 15.48% 6%

Entertainment 26.51% 11% 18.78% 24%

Business & Finance 20.91% 16% 15.01% 29%

Sports 14.93% 20% 10.88% 30%

Online Video** 36.04% 25% 27.24% 39%

Social Networking** 17.73% 6% 11.87% 18%

All figures are based on U.S. data from the Hitwise sample of 10 million Internet users. **Denotes a custom categorySource: Hitwise, an Experian company

Trends in Share of Search Referral Traffic

Videos Dominate Universal Search Results

Videos Dominate Universal Search 38% of users who searched Google were served video in Universal search engine results pages

Source – “Google Universal Search Results Searcher Penetration by Result Type” – ComScore – Jan 2008

Does this Represent a Shift to Search?

Web Search Volume: “Video(s)” vs. “News” vs. “God” vs. “Sex”

Video SEO – Definition & Methods

The application of SEO best practices in order to ensure that video content achieves maximum discoverability across search engines &

ultimately, visibility amongst your target audience

Video SEO IS– Helping search engines more easily “understand” video content

– To be used in conjunction with overall best practices for general SEO

– Something to play an important role in an overall video strategy

– A method to drive valuable traffic to your video content

Video SEO is NOT– Smoke & mirrors

– About “fooling” search engines

– An end in-and-of itself

What is Video SEO?

Options for Online Video SEO

• Hosted - Website Video SEO– Optimization of video content that is on

your website

• Posted – Video Syndication SEO – Optimization of video content uploaded

to video sharing sites, social media, etc…

Commonality– General principles for on-page & off-page

SEO apply

Options for Video SEO & Discoverability

Video SEO Best Practices

1. Benchmarking – Measure Current State & Set Goals

2. Identify the Target Audience– Do your research (Keyword research critical)

Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it.“ - (Google)

3. Approach SEO Holistically– Focus on optimizing your entire website, while at the same

time more deeply integrating your video content

4. Focus on Quality & Engagement– Nothing works as well for SEO as unique, quality content

5. Measure Success

Top 5 Things to Get Right - Strategy

1. Create Links to Your Video Section– Don’t make difficult for users to find

2. 1 Video/URL & Unique URLS w/Keywords

3. Use Embedded Players – Not Pop-ups

4. Optimize the Video Landing Page– Follow general SEO principles for titles, URLs,

metadata, H1, etc…

5. Provide Context to Surround Video Content– Leverage robust metadata generation to dynamically

build:• Contextually related links (products, videos, articles)

• Related on-page text (tags, captions, comments)

• Text transcripts of any audio content– Accessibility and search engine optimization tip

Top 10 Things to Get Right - Tactics

Video Landing Page Anatomy

6. Make it easy for search engine crawlers to discover your video content. – Enable &expose MRSS feeds/ XML

– Consider linking to your file & offering multiple file formats

7. Enable interaction & Social media– social bookmarking, embedding, commenting &rating

8. Link to videos with keyword rich anchor text– “Watch this” vs. “View the Harry Potter Trailer”

9. Create compelling thumbnails for your own SERPS– The thumbnail needs to be eye-catching and representative. It needs to show the

potential viewer what they can expect from the video and it needs to be of interest, relevant, and high quality.

10. Incorporate video results within your own site search

Top 10 Things to Get Right - Tactics

Thank YouMark R. Robertson, Founder

www.reelseo.com

Twitter.com/reelseo

Facebook.com/reelseo