Online video is an increasingly populur medium from both users' standpoints and business' alike. When done right, it can be a great way to increase engagement and spread brand awareness. It can also be used for search engine optimization purposes. I'm sure you've noticed videos come up in the blended search results for many queries.

WebProNews fired a few questions at Benjamin Wayne, CEO of Fliqz, a Video hosting firm to see if he had some good tips to offer our readers. The following is the product of our Q&A.

Do you have tips for online video promotion? Share them here.

WebProNews: Have you noticed any difference in possible ranking factors for videos among Google, Yahoo, and Bing as far as blended search results go?

Benjamin Wayne: Google tends to be the site that drives the biggest portion of SEO traffic, and they seem to currently ignore all video-level meta-data with the exception of title. Matching the title tag to the video title also appears to have beneficial effects for search ranking. Yahoo tends to dislike video submission from non-partner third parties, and often rejects feeds without providing specifics as to why. Bing seems the most sophisticated in terms of information it considers, but also employs human editors to curate results that appear within Bing Video results.

WPN: Other than the obvious YouTube, which video sites are the most important to have a presence in?

BW: This really depends on the goal, which typically bifurcates into either driving branding by piggy-backing on the audience of a third-party site like YouTube, or driving traffic through submitting videos in such a way that they appear in blended search results and drive traffic back to the publisher. In the former scenario, YouTube really has the lion's share of online video audience, and for most video producers, is the only site they need to care about. If driving traffic is the goal - and for most publishers, this should be their primary agenda - Google's blended search results account for an overwhelming majority of search traffic. Beyond Google, Bing and AOL are both good targets.

WPN: How important are YouTube's new enhanced caption features for video SEO?

BW: They're not currently a factor in how Google ranks results. If this changes, they may become more important.

WPN: How would you convince a skeptical business about the benefits of online video?

BW: As marketers, we typically care about two things: driving traffic, and converting visitors. On the former, it's hard to ignore the extraordinary efficacy of video from an SEO perspective. According to Forrester, video more than times more likely to result in a first-page Google result than traditional SEO. That's an incredibly persuasive number. When it comes to conversion, just look at Zappos recent presentation at the recent Streaming Media West, where Zappos revealed that videos result in a 6-30% greater conversion in sales. That's driving Zappos to strive for 50,000 videos produced next year. Those are numbers you can take to the bank!

WPN: Where are some good places to promote your videos, beyond the video sites themselves?

BW: If the goal is branding (which is tough in practicality to make work in online video) Google is your obvious target. Beyond that, you need to target specific vertical niches that are a solid fit with your brand, product, or service.

WPN: If there is any other video SEO advice you'd like to share, please feel free to do so.

BW: Getting video results to appear in Google is a science, so go to an expert who can help ensure that videos are indexed correctly. Google relies on title above all other meta-data to match results against searches, so make sure that you tune your title against the keywords you want to match. Matching page title tags to the video title is a good way to increase your score. To ensure that Google displays your preferred thumbnail, submit a single, rather than multiple thumbnails, in your feed. And lastly, make sure you submit both the web pages, and the videos themselves, to maximize your search results.

WebProNews would like to thank Mr. Wayne for answering our questions and sharing his insight with our readers.
 
On a related note, Topher Kohan, the SEO manager for CNN had some interesting things to say in a recent interview with WebPronews:

 Would you ask Wayne additional questions? Tell us what those would be.

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