Make the most of video content since video content is a great way to expand your market visibility as well as drive traffic to your website. Often, publishers think first and foremost about contextual content and overlook the value proposition of video. Although video content has become popular in the last several years, many marketers upload video to YouTube, but they really don’t know how to exactly leverage this platform for optimal online marketing results. Video is content, and content should be leveraged and syndicated. This helps with back links, SEO, website visibility, branding, traffic generation, and buzz.
The best video-sharing sites to upload your videos to are YouTube, Google Video, MetaCafe, Blip.tv, and DailyMotion. These sites are extremely popular and get the most traffic and visitors.
Don’t forget that you can also syndicate your video content through Really Simple Syndication (RSS), if you have it on your website. Following are some quick tips for optimizing video for killer search engine and marketing results:
(A) Keep clips less than 5 minutes in length, and make sure they’re relevant, beneficial, and interesting to users. Your video clips also could be teasers (excerpts or snippets) that link to a fuller-length video on your website.
(B) Give your video a powerful, eye-catching title. This is where good copywriting skills come into play. Try to think of a great headline that would stop you dead in your tracks. This is the most important element of the video, because you only have a few seconds to grab your prospect’s attention and make him or her click to watch.
(C) Pack your title and description full of your top keywords—keywords that are in your video and that your target audience will search for.
(D) Make sure your video is tagged (metadata) properly with your keywords to get picked up by search engine spiders.
(E) Make sure your video includes either your company logo or your URL, for branding.
(F) Cross-market your video in your e-newsletters, on your website, and in your social media accounts (Twitter, LinkedIn), to drive traffic and create buzz.
(G) If the video is on your website, encourage other users to republish it by offering the proper code that makes it easy for them to copy and paste. This helps with viral marketing.
