Video search and SEO services provider EveryZing has introduced MediaCloud, an online service that automatically generates search-friendly metadata for video, audio and other rich media content. One of the big problems with rich media is that without accompanying metadata that describes the contents, video and audio files are essentially “invisible” to search engines.

MediaCloud seeks to solve this problem by automatically generating metadata for rich media files. The metadata generated by MediaCloud includes speech transcripts, time-stamped tags, categories/topics, named entities, geo-location and tagged thumbnails—all of which can be indexed by search engines and used to improve the findability of rich media content.

MediaCloud is an online software-as-a-service program. To use it, publishers upload audio, video or image files, which are processed in near real-time by EveryZing. The generated metadata can then be used as-is, or edited to enhance or improve accuracy via an online dashboard.

The service is priced on a per-minute basis at 50 cents a minute, with technical accuracies of 70-90%. Currently, the service is available only to “larger” publishers, with a self-serve system designed for small companies, bloggers and individuals planned for the third quarter of this year. Once this is available, it should be a boon to SEOs who are currently optimizing rich media files by hand, especially given how inexpensive the service is to use.

For more information, including details of EveryZing’s video SEO tools, see EveryZing’s home page.

The Forrester Blog published a small but interesting study on how you can improve your chances, by 50 times, of showing up at the top of the Google search results. Their tip? Utilize Google’s Universal Search by creating videos.

Not only does Forrester share statistics and analysis on how to improve your odds with videos, but they also share tips on how to improve your video’s chance at being the top video in Google web search.

Let’s first discuss the odds. The blog post showed that a video has a “11,000-to-1 chance of making it onto the first page of results.” If you compare that to web pages for the same keyword set, you only have a “500,000-to-1 chance” of getting on the first page. So for keywords that show video results in Google, you have a “50 times better chance of appearing on the first page of results than any given text page in the index,” reports Forrester.

How can you improve those odds? Well, use some of the tips Forrester gives on how to achieve that top spot for your video.

• Insert keywords into your video filenames.
• Host your videos on YouTube, and embed those YouTube videos into your own site. Google says its algorithms consider how many times a video is viewed, and any views embedded videos receive on your own site get added to the ‘views’ tally on YouTube. (And yes, nearly every video we saw Google blend into its results came from YouTube.)
• Optimize your YouTube videos by writing keywords into your videos’ titles, descriptions, and tags.
• Embed videos into relevant text pages on your site. The context provided by the text on those pages (which is hopefully already optimized for search as well) will help the search engines figure out what your videos are about.
• Also create a video library on your site, so Google knows where to find your video content. (Google Video Sitemaps can help with this too.) Write keyword-rich annotations for each video in the library.

For more details, you will want to check out the blog post at the Forrester Blog.

Where 2 Get It, a location based services and mapping solutions provider for businesses, recently announced its own video search engine optimization solution: video inside landing pages for local businesses. However is this really Video SEO, or just SEO which happens to include video?

With declarations about Video SEO like those in Where 2 Get It’s recent press release announcing it as “one of the fastest-growing Internet search trends,” it’s easy to see why more companies are now promoting and augmenting their own marketing solutions with this same term. However, I often find this wider use generates increased misunderstanding—and sometimes lack of appreciation—of what Video SEO really involves. As a professional in the Video SEO space, and before that in the SEO space for many years, I can attest that Video SEO is just not the same thing as SEO, and despite what some companies may be implying, simply inserting video inside an page or site that’s optimized for the search engines just doesn’t qualify as a “Video SEO” solution. A professional search optimizer who works with video will tell you that Video SEO has some very clear distinctions from traditional, text-based SEO. As someone who’s built web sites with video and optimized video for the search engines for a number of clients, here is how I’ve come to define the fundamentals Video SEO:

• Creation of unique video content
• A strategy of implementing related keywords and content inside and around the video
• Direct act of submission or indexing by the web search engines, or video sharing sites indexed by the
• web search engines, or even social media and networking sites accepting video and are indexed by the search engines

(Or, you offer a video program directly on your site allowing your clients or users to do this.)

Using some techniques, while separate from the actual video, are certainly good strategies for Video SEO:

• Individual, separate web pages dedicated to just the video content itself (these can also include a transcript of the video content)
• A video site map (links of all your pages
• A video section on your site (subdomain or folder) with inbound links to other video
• “Video” listed in your navigation scheme and site’s main link structure

Some things are not Video SEO but may have an indirect impact on search engine visibility include:

• Sharing features in the video (embed video, copy link, send to a friend, etc.)
• Ratings and comments

It is also important to understand the difference between a video solutions provider and a video SEO specialist.

The video solutions provider—hosting, content planning and production, publishing, exporting, distribution, submission, monetization, etc—is the catalyst. They can provide the tools or access to the solution; they do not implement the actual SEO work (video content appearing in search results) without external assistance.

The Video SEO specialist provides such assistance. They have the ability to actually implement any of these tools so the actual video content shows a direct improvement in a client’s search engine results—and more importantly, leading to higher conversions.

I had the opportunity to interview Manish Patel, CEO of Where 2 Get It, and ask him questions about his company’s example “Video SEO solutions” page Where 2 Get It featured in their press release—a single Office Depot storefront. Amish explained to me that Where 2 Get It incorporated its new video content feature as part of its Search Locator program, already touted as successful SEO local search solution for national, regional, even local brands. But does their new offering of video qualify as a Video SEO solution?

The answer: Yes, but only in their partnership program with Mixpo, which does provide video-specific landing page creation (separate from the Where 2 Get It page), submission to the search engines and video sharing sites, performance tracking, and multivariate testing. That being said, Where 2 Get It could have offered a much better example than the one featured in their press release. Some of the viewing on the video example don’t actually work (such as HD format), and a number of the standard video sharing and call-to-action features that Mixpo provides weren’t available, either.

Turns out that Manish agrees with my distinction. “The Office Depot example definitely falls more on the side of using video to supplement an existing SEO entity (the Office Depot local page). This example does not fully exploit or demonstrate Video SEO,” he said.

Glen Pingul, Marketing Director for Mixpo, confirmed that all of the features normally described in their video publishing platform are available to those participating in Where 2 Get It’s Search Locator program. So that would just mean that the press release example was not the best indicator of the features that could be offered to customers.

Its good to hear from the CEO of Where 2 Get It that they actually now do “get it”—meaning of course, the difference between Video SEO and SEO. While its an honest mistake, they should still replace their poor example with something that really showcases more of the actual Video SEO benefits they’re promoting, and hopefully other companies with similar Video SEO partnership will get better about doing that as well. Otherwise it will lead to the type of confusion that even CEOs will be at a loss to explain, and industry analysts like myself to do a double-take.

Grant Crowell is the Owner of Grantastic Designs and Senior Media Analyst for ReelSEO.com. His upcoming white paper, Video SEO: The Solution for the Newspaper Industry, is scheduled for publication in October 2008.

Video is becoming an important part of local search marketing campaigns, and this week’s SMX Local Mobile conference features talking about how small and medium businesses can use video to be more effective with their online marketing. Video solutions providers to these panels are Jared Simon, VP of Business Development of TurnHere, and Anupam Gupta, President and CEO of Mixpo. I caught up with Gupta earlier this week and asked for a preview of what he’ll be presenting at the conference.

To summarize, Mixpo is a turnkey video marketing solution geared specifically for SMBs (small-to-medium businesses), which combines a self-service platform including hosting, an interactive video player, and online editing that allows clients to simply and quickly repurpose their video.

One of the notable SEO benefits: Multiple videos can be developed from a single original client video, allowing for an easier assembly of video content applied for both search optimization and video advertising.

“This is an exciting time for online video advertising. More advertising dollars and marketing budgets are moving towards video. Big brands and big advertisers jumped into video first. Now there are millions of small brands and advertisers that are just starting to get exposed to online video,” says Anupam.

He explains that SMBs are in an ideal position to take advantage of video marketing and video SEO. “Video is a powerful mechanism for communicating what your business is all about,” says Anupam. “Video drives more qualified leads and conversions, all in a way that is measurable and where we can show accountability. Measurability and accountability is what made search marketing successful, and that’s what SMBs and SMB advertisers need to be all about to succeed.”

Adding to the benefits of video are interactivity technologies for direct customer engagement. In the top-right hand corner of each Mixpo video is an icon, which allows the viewer to choose from a series of calls-to-action any time during video play.

“We’re already seeing a lot of interest from the SMB industry. Video is in the early stages where we’re going to see a lot of ramp in even just the next number of months to come,” says Anupam.

He explains that Mixpo has two constituents: The actual advertiser (client) who wants to be more effective in their online marketing, and the aggregator, who already has a relationship with these customers. Mixpo refers to “aggregators” as interactive agencies, directories, publishers, etc.

“What we hear from agencies – including firms involved in search marketing and SEO – is that they need more effective tools and capabilities to serve their clients in a better way, and show them how they can drive measurable results,” says Anupam. “What we hear from advertisers, is what they’ve been traditionally doing online hasn’t necessarily worked, or they can’t really measure the effectiveness of all of their marketing programs.”

Both of these constituents do understand search as a measurement tool, “and really love the ability where they can measure things on their own” says Anupam. “Everything Mixpo provides is backed by a very solid measurement platform,” which allows for optimization of both performance and visibility online.

As for Mixpo’s business model, it’s rather simple: cost-effective opportunities for SMB advertisers, and sharing advertising revenue with their aggregator partners, whatever their sharing model may be. “Their success is our success,” says Anupam.

As for a sneak preview into his presentation, Anupam shared with me that people attending his session can expect to learn about Mixpo’s recent partnership activities and how they will benefit search marketers involved, or looking to get involved, in the local video space. He also mentioned that their own solution is a good complement to fellow video speaker TurnHere, which concentrates more on the creative agency side of video production compared to Mixpo’s focus on their self-service platform. Mixpo does offer their own creative agency services, but Anupam looks at TurnHere as a technology and marketing ally for the emerging local video space, and not really a competitor.

Grant Crowell is the CEO of Grantastic Designs, a web design and search solutions provider specializing in new media strategies for B2B and B2C companies.

In a previous article titled New Online Video News Search Study – Is the Business Case Made?, I discussed a DoubleClick Performics study that looked at how consumers interact with online video news, how they use search in the process, and their desire to see more video search results on the mainstream search engines. To get more in-depth information on this first-of-its-kind study, I recently interviewed Eric Papczun, Director of Natural Search Optimization for DoubleClick Performics. The following is our Q&A about the report findings and the potential opportunities for SEO with news video:

Grant: So what was the motivation for your company to devise this report?

Eric: This study is definitely a first attempt by DoubleClick Performics at getting a better shot at understanding the needs—the demands and supply, if you will—as well as the tools available online for people to find news video. What we gathered , more than anything, is information that will help us take a deeper dive the next time around.

This study essentially covered some basic points: What video consumption is currently taking place online and how does it break down by demographic? What is the news search demand?

We didn’t just say video. We were simply looking at the demand in search for news. Then we kind of brought those two things together-video news and search. And then when people stumbled upon news video that was integrated within search results-be it Google, CNN, Yahoo, MSN, etc. -were they likely to click on it? Were they consuming it? And lastly, what were the tools that they favored to find this news video?

We decided to go pretty broad and shallow with our research, as opposed to focused and deep. But I think that sets us up in a pretty good situation-not just for DoubleClick Performics, but for others out there in the online space to dig deeper into these issues.

From your study, we have some summaries that are already well understood: Such as video is in high demand and has high engagement levels. What would really jump out in your findings that a marketing audience should really pay attention to?

What jumped out to me was that search engines are doing a pretty poor job of helping people find news, especially timely video news content. Our report showed that only one third of people were listed as “very satisfied” with the news-related results they got back. Those are pretty weak numbers. If Google had a one third success rate on searches, we’d all be looking for other search engines. I think there’s a gap right now between the demand and desire to find news video and search engines’ ability to bring back quality results.

And why do you think that is?

Part of that is the lack of good integrated video search results. We’re seeing YouTube as the primary publisher that is featured within Google, and even in Yahoo!. There’s not good diversity there; we don’t get more listings from quality news video providers like CNN, CBS, BBC, and everyone else. It just doesn’t provide enough quality offerings. I think to some degree, we’re seeing some people saying that they wouldn’t mind if they had more video news results in their universal searches. So I think it’s a combination with Google trying to find the right balance between text search results and video search results; and I think there just needs to be more diversification of the results from publishers.

So now that we understand how video is displayed within Google’s universal results, it seems that there’s no rhyme or reason as to when video results will appear for a news-related search, including whether or not a displayed video icon or embedded video will appear in a single result. Again, since your report would confirm that news content is highly regarded in search results and has high engagement levels with consumers, let me ask you: do you believe news video is being taken advantage of by online marketers, or not?

I don’t think news video is being marketed anywhere near the extent that it could be. True, online video can be difficult and unpredictable. Its not like in SEO where, if you do a set of best practices, and your site is considered “worthy” to be included because you followed those best practices, then the chances of being in the top of the listings-the top couple of pages-is quite high. The SEOs can help relevant clients get listed. But with video, it’s a lot trickier; it seems a lot more random at times. To some degree, we’re frustrated by that, but concurrently it’s also a really opportunistic time. We can say that its tough today, but we can still figure this out. So the more we can get a head start from everybody else, then when the engines do get to a point where they’re better at selecting these videos and listing them, we’re going to be in pretty good shape. So my advice to SEOs is this: take advantage of video and this special kind of imperfection.

The further one explores the video space; you realize how many marketing niches there can be. Your approach with your company’s report on news video and search was to “cast a large net and getting the shallow fish,” so to speak. You didn’t appear to further segment the information by well distinguished news segments. Some examples that come to mind are newspaper publishers or television stations, or doing geotargeting from the hyper-local to the regional news services. That being said, do you think that the information in your report can be used as a starting point across the board for all different types of news video, or do you think it will require further analysis?

I think the information in this report is both a starting point and an opportunity for further analysis. We’re not trying to accomplish everything in one survey. I think what DoubleClick Performics set out to accomplish was to gather some high-level data. It’s surprising the large degree of video consumption that’s taking place. Even though video engagement tends to skew towards the younger demographic and female demographic, our survey has shown it to really permeate across all age groups. I was surprised to see high-consumption of news video by older groups. We made some kind of high-level points in the report; but to your own point, a deeper dive in some of these other areas would very much be welcomed.

Now let’s shift the focus from the consumers to the news publisher. Traditional publishers who have been hit hard with decreased circulation, subscribers, and ad revenue are employing new online content resources, especially with producing news video in-house. My question is, do you have any inclination on how well these traditional news publishers are doing with marketing their video news content online, including with video SEO? From what I’ve seen, most news publishers seem to stick with keeping their own content on their own internal network. They appear rather hesitant to participating in an outside distribution model and don’t appear to be too keen about optimizing their video content for the search engines. They might have a YouTube channel for such distribution, but that’s about it—no SEO around their video and no real social networking plan. They appear to also have issues with putting their video content on popular video sites, where they can’t control what content appears next to their own video. On top of my first question, would it be a fair assessment to say that the news publishers, who could be considered in a prime position to benefit from the Video SEO opportunity you mention, are not pursuing it for reasons including that they would have to relinquish some control over how that video is featured?

That’s obviously a business decision for the news publishers, and there are a lot of good reasons why they would want to keep complete control over their content. However, I think there’s another side to that argument. By getting that video out there and getting more visibility on that content, they’re going to pull a lot more people into their sites, get them more engaged, and acquire more registered users. There are a lot of things traditional news publishers could gain from letting their video content be displayed outside of their internal network. But at the end of the day, it’s up to experienced marketing folks like you to work with clients to help them look at both sides of the issue and make a good business decision one way or the other.

I will say that when I advise clients, I encourage them to at least get out there and put their toe in the water. You don’t have to put every single piece of video content out on YouTube; you don’t even have to build a YouTube channel. But what you can at least do is experiment with certain news stories, showcase some video and get some good metrics around it, see what data comes back, and go from there.

Grant Crowell is the CEO of Grantastic Designs, a web design and search solutions provider specializing in new media strategies for B2B and B2C companies.

Adobe recently announced their final release of the Acrobat Pro 9 software line, touting new video capabilities that are meant to provide a wider range of interactive publishing capabilities, along with improved engagement methods for end users. What’s unmentioned in Adobe’s press releases on the Acrobat 9 series is that there are some special benefits for search engine marketers. Acrobat 9 may be the first all-inclusive software program that can implement, distribute, and even optimize video for search results. That’s a big plus for most search optimizers who are looking to take advantage of the video space but lack video post-production technical skills.

Recently I interviewed Michael Folkers, Group Product Manager for Adobe Acrobat, to discuss more of Acrobat 9’s video features and the new advantages for SEOs with the latest software release:

Video SEO benefit – simpler production

Most SEO specialists are not highly skilled in video post-production, including taking uncompressed video files (typically from a client or 3rd party media producer) and encoding them to the Web or popular social media platform specs. With Acrobat 9, video files can now be inserted directly into the PDF and viewed by anyone who has the free Acrobat Reader 9 plug-in installed on their system. What that means for SEOs is they no longer have to understand special video conversion requirements and encoding to multiple file formats. With Acrobat 9, even Microsoft Powerpoint files and Word files with video can be turned into animated, optimizable PDFs.

“The design guidelines for how we approached this were to make the barrier for entry very, very low,” said Folkers. “By that, I mean the ‘average knowledge worker’ should be able to assemble a PDF with video very easily. The average knowledge worker should be able to drag-and-drop a video clip, trim it, and assign other quality settings to it very, very easily for distribution downstream. We have plugging this authoring capability inside common workflows today. So, I think the ability to propagate and distribute this content was made a lot easier with this release of Acrobat.”

SEO benefit – social media optimization

Acrobat 9 also allows for embedded video to include comment tags from multiple viewers. While Acrobat’s product managers confided with me that they weren’t aware if Acrobat’s comment tags had ever shown themselves indexable by the search engines, comment tags are a valuable social media asset (just check out the new comment annotations with YouTube). Providing for comment tags can increase the potential for backlinks, which translates to the better SEO of the PDF file.

SEO benefit – a strong compliment to your existing video SEO strategy

Granted, Acrobat 9’s software features are not meant to eliminate any of the current strategies that video search optimizers are currently doing. However, they can provide a highly complementary means of having indexable PDF text content around all of your video files, and may even be used as an acceptable duplicate of your existing content without incurring any search engine spam penalties.

I further pressed Folkers on what new advantages their Acrobat 9 could offer search optimizers who were looking to include video in their SEO campaign.

“To the degree that you’re making this more approachable to the person that’s interested in search marketing, the answer I believe is, to the degree that the PDF is being discovered, once people reach it, it’s going to be a whole lot more impactful than almost any other communications media that they can come up with,” he said. “The reason for that is that not only does it include video, but it also includes all of the other elements into a cohesive, branded method for delivering information that’s really quite engaging. Finding video in YouTube or other Web 2.0 environments – I can’t believe it could be any more compelling than what you could accomplish with a PDF that you deliver.”

Before you buy yourself a copy, be aware that the Acrobat Pro Extended version is the one with the full range of video features. The “Pro” version is the highest level for the Mac, and has less video platform capabilities. The “Standard” version has no video features.

One overall limitation: the video experience with Acrobat 9 is not backwards-compatible. This means that those people still using earlier versions of Acrobat Reader will just see an image in place of the video.

My recommendation: get a 30-day trial copy of either the Pro Extended (Windows) or Pro (Mac) program and test it out. Don’t use in it place of any other video SEO or video marketing activities, but do test out its indexability in the search engines and linkability in the social media space. That said, Acrobat 9 qualifies as a good complement to your video SEO strategy, which you can really start launching by the end of summer 2008.

Grant Crowell is the CEO of Grantastic Designs, a web design and search solutions provider specializing in new media strategies for B2B and B2C companies.

Why all the fuss about the importance of online video SEO for small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) as a way to ultimately help to drive action and sales? I get versions of this question on a super regular basis, but instead of trotting out some top-level trends, today I thought I’d cite a specific study that proves to be very illustrative to this discussion:

In looking at a bevy of recent writings, some very interesting research was noted by my friend and SEO guru Mark Robertson, who reported that research from the folks at FindLaw showed that video marketing, which in this case meant adding an online video to a law firm’s web site, can help increase, to a somewhat dramatic extent, conversions from prospective clients.

The research reported that consumers typically visit an average of nearly five Web sites (4.8 actually) before deciding which attorney to select. When lawyers added video to their respective Web sites, however, this number decreased fairly substantially, to 1.8. Studies like this are great. They show the promise of how video can help small and medium sized businesses and point to the importance of placing video strategically throughout the “buying funnel” with the right messaging at the right time—and in the legal case above, accelerate people down the buying funnel. Let’s explore some possible explanations, of which there are many.

Online video can = better landing pages and conversions vis-à-vis users who arrive from the major search engines and elsewhere. Working with a range of clients on search engine marketing tactics incorporating video ads into their landing pages, we’ve seen conversions (we define as people who are viewing the video and clicking on a direct response action such as email inquiry, clicking for more information, or clicking to provide contact information a.k.a. lead generation) as high as 50%!

On a crowded search results page, online video can make the choice seem more clear, limiting the need or desire by users to “shop around” though search results and elsewhere. It’s too early to tell conclusively, but one would surmise that at a time when the use of video is still comparatively limited, the companies who do use it have a chance to “stand out” from others, whether in search results or elsewhere. Over time, however, as more and more SMBs leverage video in their search marketing, that will change. Longer-term, what will help businesses engage prospects is having the right video presented at the right time. Having the ability to measure the effectiveness of video advertising is something more businesses are aggressively focusing on now – having moved way past the notion that just publishing video is good enough to stand out.

The wow factor: Related to the above, people are attracted to something new. As I’ve written in the past few months, the Wow Factor only goes so far, especially as more companies adopt online video: Quality and relevant content will ultimately win, boosted by effective technologies and presentation formats, like video. For SMBs, I cannot underscore enough the importance of what I mean by effective technologies. To be effective, it has to be utilized. Looking back at our own experience in launching a video platform earlier this year, we spent a ton of time striving to make the process as “Apple-like” as possible – i.e., as elegant and simple as possible for business use. This means taking the word technology out of the businesses’ mindset and letting them focus on creating informative video ads that they can adjust and optimize that helps them in search discovery—and more importantly, giving viewers a reason to engage.

If it’s done right, video can make sites more relevant and useful to consumers: This helps in the SEO world, of course, but it’s just plain good business, too. To really work over time, online video and video SEO require freshness, tweaking, and just plain updating, just like Web sites and blogs do. This is to not only be discovered through search engines, but to be more fully read or viewed by users.

It’s been said before, but bears reiterating: Online video can level the playing field for the small business people of the world, by providing an affordable and interesting way to showcase points of differentiation from bigger competitors. From an SEO standpoint, it’s the ability to easily adjust and update that will drive true value both for search optimization, user engagement, and ultimately faster conversions.

This may seem like a lot to extrapolate from one study of the legal category, but it’s important to remember that most lawyers operate as small businesses. Just like any other small business, they need to stand out from the pack in crowded marketplaces, ultimately for the benefit of driving closer to their goal: more business.

Glenn Pingul is VP of marketing for Mixpo, an online video advertising company dedicated to small- and medium-sized businesses. The Small Is Beautiful column appears on Thursdays at Search Engine Land.

Many of us in the online video advertising space have been encouraging small businesses to deploy video to stand out in search results and level the playing field with larger competitors. Some colleagues and I have been working with select clients to test, learn, test again, and learn again from placing video in search and other distribution points. The early learnings have been interesting and reinforced some tips outlined further below.

Big picture search marketing that leverages video will be among the most effective ways to market, specifically when video gets decent placement in search results and can show that it drives action. Let’s take a look at a test case:

One agency we work with specializes in marketing and sales for large-scale condominium developments—and the individual SMBs who manage those properties. For several months, we’ve been testing video ads on the agency’s web site, in ad networks, and in both search engine marketing and organic video search.

For some property videos on the agency’s web site, we’ve seen views-to-impressions ratios as high as 70% (similar to the luxury broker we talked about last month) and conversions (actions-to-views ratios) of almost 40%. We believe these amazing ratios reflect the value of keeping video relevant to what viewers expect to see when they view it.

On Google video search, the agency videos have achieved six of the top ten video search returns on some pretty broad search terms related to condos in their market. Pretty impressive results, most people would say.

However, when you type the same broad search terms in Google universal search, the agency’s videos appear on the seventh search engine results page—as the 75th result. Results, on universal search, of course vary based on a number of factors, including the tags, keyword competitiveness, and in paid search, the bid.

What does it all mean to SMBs? We believe it signifies both the promise of online video and the still-early nature of video used in organic search.

Some video-related tips to keep in mind in 2008

Relevance is key. We’ve said it before—it’s all about relevance. The higher the relevance of the video to the information that surrounds it, the better the results.

Use focused keywords. The tighter, the better. For the condominium marketing agency, we can track what keywords people type to locate video ads. We’ve seen “long tail” terms like “old historic Seattle buildings with condos for sale” return property video ad landing pages toward the top of universal search results pages.

Create useful content. We are often asked, “How long should a video be?” We have deployed video ads for a number of clients and are finding that viewers watch an average of 70% of an ad, regardless of video length. If content is useful, people will watch it.

Optimize for performance. Unlike single .flv files that you upload to YouTube and leave alone, we change and optimize VideoAds for our clients wherever they are distributed. With some clients we’ve made tweaks to their VideoAds and seen views-to-impressions ratios increase by over 35% and true conversions (clicks-to-views ratios) increase by over 50%.

Some video-related things to avoid:

Redundant multiple postings. Posting to every video sharing site does not necessarily result in higher placement on search engine results pages. This makes sense, because video search sites don’t want a high duplication of results in their returns. Several months ago, we would see our client’s videos “stacked” on search engine results pages because of all the sites to which we’d submitted. We’re seeing less of that today.[CM1]

Irrelevant content. The more targeted the keywords, the more focused the video must be. We have seen that less relevant VideoAds tend to lose viewers in the early part of the video – often with high abandonment at the less than 10% of video mark.

Online video is still very new and its power in search is still based on the promise of both the discoverability of the video and what happens when someone sees the video. In the early stages of a medium that holds so much promise for marketers, it’s most important to test, test, test and learn, learn, learn. The search algorithms are constantly changing and, consequently, so is the game. But advertisers who stay true to consumers are bound to come out on top.

Glenn Pingul is VP of marketing for Mixpo, an online video advertising company dedicated to small- and medium-sized businesses. The Small Is Beautiful column appears on Thursdays at Search Engine Land.

Although YouTube hit pop-culture status just a couple years ago, online video has been a staple of corporate and content websites for quite a bit longer. In that time, web designers have tried many approaches to viewing experience, trying to combine compelling content with a user-friendly interface.

After many experiments with plug-ins and third-party players, most designers settled on the concept of an all-in-one Flash-based player. These players deliver a device-like experience, using TiVo, iTunes and even BMW’s iDrive as models for a self-contained, easy-to-use interface. All-in-one players usually combine a viewing screen, playback controls, “related video” links, and often an ad banner. The player works by using Flash’s ability to pull video directly off the server, so that from a user standpoint clips can be played back seamlessly.

Now that YouTube et al. have entered the game, there’s a newfound enthusiasm for video content, but it’s also changed the game somewhat. The potential viewing audience is now much larger than the group of visitors already on your site. In fact, video has reached the point where it behaves like an independent marketing channel, offering content to users who may never visit your website.

This is both a blessing and a curse. While access to new audiences is great, the trade-off is that it’s becoming much more difficult to track these people. Their YouTube activity is off your radar screen, at least as far as conventional web analytics are concerned.

Finding a more direct path

As we talked about in a previous column, the most effective online video strategies are the ones where on-site and off-site videos dovetail. Off-site videos create the initial interest, and then drive people back to your on-site content.

But there’s a third leg to this bar stool: on-site videos can also function as a promotional tool by making these clips compatible with video search engines. While YouTube and other upload-type portals dominate right now, pure video search is rapidly gaining ground in the form of universal search functions offered by Google, Yahoo, and Ask.

With time, people will come to rely on universal search as a direct path to video content, making this an avenue that marketers will want to pursue.

Don’t bring a knife to a gunfight

The problem arises when we try to reconcile these new video search needs with existing all-in-one players. These players have scripts that allow them to communicate with their servers, something that search engines aren’t equipped to do. As a result, you could have a player that has access to thousands of clips, but none of them will be detected and cataloged by a search engine.

Websites that have achieved success in video search did so by taking a very different approach. Rather than delivering all clips through a single access point, they’ve done the opposite: individual landing pages for every video in their inventory. This reflects our newfound priority, which is to provide a variety of entry points that attract a wider viewing audience.

In case this all sounds familiar, it’s because this is exactly what YouTube does. Before YouTube was a Google property, one of its top priorities was to achieve widespread visibility in search results. They realized that the only way to get this done was to generate unique landing pages for all their videos, in the hope of attracting long-tail traffic for very specific searches. And it worked – they drew a huge audience, and got $1.6 billion for their efforts.

Balancing findability with usability

More traffic is great, but are we sacrificing too much in the name of popularity? Video landing pages would seem to eliminate all the usability advantages that all-in-one players offer. In place of a streamlined “device” we now have thousands of very conventional-looking webpages that, on the surface, look more unwieldy for users and developers alike.

But in practice, this isn’t the case. For example, these websites still incorporate “related video” links into the viewing screen. But they also supplement them with “related videos” on the page itself, because that’s what search engines will use to discover the rest of the site.

Redundant? Yes – but users don’t actually mind redundancy. Redundancy improves usability if it results in can’t-miss-it, don’t-make-me-think ease of use. For example, when a car company places the volume control on a steering wheel, they don’t delete it from the radio itself.

The bottom line

The trade-offs between player design versus search engine visibility seem to favor visibility. Most videos exist to attract attention, either to themselves or to accompanying advertisements. Therefore, the need to promote and increase visibility takes precedence.

In this new environment, companies using all-in-one players need to take a very serious second look at what they’ve gained, versus the opportunities they’re missing out on.

Sherwood Stranieri is Director of Natural Search at SMG Search, a dedicated search unit of Starcom MediaVest Group. Based in Chicago, SMG Search creates integrated search strategies for some of the world’s largest companies. The Video Search column appears weekly at Search Engine Land.

Since the advent of “blended” or “universal search” last year across the major engines, there’s been ongoing discussion and speculation about its impact on user behavior and search marketing. Gord Hotchkiss last year wrote extensively about how blended search (on Google) has in fact shifted the user focus from the so-called “golden triangle” at the upper left of the page to a more distributed pattern that resembles an “E.”

Now search marketing firm iProspect has released a study (conducted by JupiterResearch) that shows users are responding to the various specialized content types within search results and are more engaged with them than they are the vertical search silos the search engine have historically offered. Just over 2,400 US adults participated in the iProspect survey, conducted in December 2007 and January of this year. It focused on Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft Live Search.

Among the various content types now showing up in blended search, “news” results were found to be the most clicked form of vertical content. The study’s overall findings reinforce a point increasingly being made: marketers need to broaden and optimize their various content types to be found in blended search results.

Here are the top-level findings of the iProspect study:

• 36 percent of search engine users click “news” results within blended search results, while only 17 percent click a “news” result after conducting a news-specific search

• 31 percent of search engine users click “image” results within blended search results, while 26 percent click an “image” result after conducting an image-specific search
• 17 percent of search engine users click “video” results within blended search results, while only 10 percent click a “video” result after conducting a video-specific search While images are the most clicked type of result after a vertical-specific search, news items are the most clicked type of result within blended search results

This higher user engagement with vertical content in traditional web search results comes as no surprise. Vertical search tabs have been largely neglected by users historically (except for image search), as this Hitwise survey of the traffic distribution on various Google properites illustrates:

Source: Hitwise, January, 2008

The following charts from the iProspect survey are graphical presentations of the data points cited above, showing the contrast between usage of vertical search in their respective content silos and the higher engagement (clicks) on vertical content within the main search results:

The study also found growth in the user bias toward the first page of search results:

• 68 percent of search engine users typically click results on the first page of search results, compared to 62 percent in 2006, and 60 percent in 2004

• Only 8 percent of search engine users review more than the first three pages prior to clicking on a result
• 49 percent of search engine users who continue their search when not finding what they are looking for change and/or re-launch their search after reviewing just the first page of search results, up from 40 percent in 2006, and 42 percent in 2004

Finally, the study also found an increase in the brand impact associated with appearance at the top of search results: “37 percent of online users associate appearance at the top of search results with a company’s leadership within its industry or category, up slightly from 35 percent in 2006 and 33 percent in 2002.”

This latter point has been made in the past, but it reinforces the notion that search marketing has to be taken seriously as a branding medium. That is being made easier to swallow for many agencies and brand marketers by the recent inclusion of video in paid search ads on Google and Yahoo.