Creating the video: The video should be short – not less than 1 minute but not greater than 3 minutes. Include your website URL and branding (logo) on the video. Make sure that your video is informative, helpful, funny or interesting and appeals to your target demographic or otherwise people will hit the back button. Two tools for video creation include:

• Camtasia – great for creating screen captures for short ‘how to’ videos.
• Animoto – free or paid version available – make a video slideshow with photos.

Alternatively, you can record a DIY video using a video recorder or your phone. For a professional look and feel, outsource the video creation to a video production company.

Channels: Channels create a richer connection with viewers and encourage interaction. They allow you to create a profile, add subscriptions, friends and respond to video comments.

Video title: As with web pages, it is important to have a good keyword rich title. Place the keyword at the start of the title if possible. A good tip is to search for that particular keyword and look at the titles of similar videos.

Description text: Include a link to your website at the very top of the description. This will be a no follow link but you want people to click on the link once they have finished watching the video.

Video tags: Tags play an important role in vidoeo SEO and help people to find your video. For example, if people are looking for videos about health and fitness, your video might be tagged with the keywords ‘health’, ‘fitness’ and ‘exercise’.

File URLs: Use a keyword in the filename URL which also reflects the content of the video. Thus, if the video is about a new wedding venue launched at your hotel, a good file name might be http://www.mysite.com/wedding-venue-name-of-venue.mp4.

Allow embed code: Allowing the embed code on your videos means that people can copy and paste the code directly to their own website. This will enable other users to share and embed your video code onto their own blogs and websites and create backlinks to your video which can help increase Video SEO – Search Engine Optimisation.

Encourage ratings and reviews: When you encourage users to rate your video, the Video Search Engines will pay attention to videos that have higher ratings. In addition, videos which get high ratings from users tend to be the same videos that users often mark as favourites and share with other users.

Post your video as a video response to someone else’s video: This is a great way to attract more views to your video. You only get one chance per video to post as a video response so use it wisely. In order to make this work to your best advantage, you should consider the following:

• Is their video popular – look at the You Tube insight data (an important tool for video SEO).
• Is their video trending upwards?
• Do they accept video responses?
• Is your video related – are they likely to accept your video response?

Subscribe to other channels: Subscribing to other related channels to drive traffic to your website is a good video marketing strategy. Leave a comment that provides value to the channel owner and mention your website address. This will drive traffic and interest to your channel, building your profile on YouTube and increase subscribers to your channel.

Upload the video to your own website: Upload the video onto your own website and introduce a video sitemap for Search Engines. You have a choice here in either embedding the video code from YouTube to increase the ‘views’ tally on YouTube or upload the video directly to your website and encourage links back.

In its simplest form, Google says that the Video Sitemap must link to a landing page for a video as well as some essential information required for indexing the video. Once you have created your Video Sitemap, you can submit it to Google using Webmaster Tools.

Link bait: Use the video as link bait in your link building strategies. Provide great content in your video to encourage other relevant, credible and quality websites to link back to your video. Link to your video in a new blog post, promote your video on social networks like Twitter and Facebook and add your video to your Google Local Business Listing.

Internal linking also has link value so make sure you remember to link to the video within your own website as well.

Submit your video to YouTube video sites: Submit the link of your YouTube video to the following Web 2.0 sites and social networks to drive traffic to your video:

• StumbleUpon
• Digg
• Mixx
• Reddit
• Twitter
• Facebook
• OnlyWire

Video Syndication: Manually submitting your video to all of the video sites can be time consuming so it may be more cost effective to use a syndication service even if you have to pay a subscription fee. When syndicating your video, don’t forget to fill in a profile on each video site. You can obtain a back link to your site from each of these profiles for your link building strategy. There are two main distribution services that you can use to do this for you:

• Tube Mogul (free)
• Traffic Geyser (paid – $97 / month)

When uploading to the video sites, only choose the sites that will fit with your video’s topic and target audience. For instance, How Cast only supports ‘how to’ videos and likewise, Stupid Videos might not always be an appropriate site for your ‘how to’ video.

With comScore reporting in 2009 that YouTube alone has surpassed 100,000 million users watching videos, can you afford to ignore this online video marketing strategy any longer? Contact us to find out how we can help you leverage the benefits that Video SEO – Search Engine Optimisation or VSEO provides. We can grow your video channel and brand, drive traffic to your website, increase your Search Engine ranking and add to your bottom line.