How Does Web Video Fit into Internet Marketing & Search Engine Strategies?

The Web video rocket ship has launched and is headed for the stratosphere. What does this mean for small and medium businesses and their websites? Specifically, how does video fit into their Internet marketing and search engine strategies?

Remember the basics of search engine marketing. First, people have to find you - perhaps by searching for "vintage jewelry". Then they have to convert into paying customers - perhaps by buying that rhinestone necklace. Can a website video help with either or both of these steps?

There's been so much buzz recently around video search - all the big search engines offer it - that you'd think it was a great way for consumers to find your Website Videos and be drawn to your site. But there are two problems with this theory. First, few consumers actually use video search. Second, video search engines still only index a small fraction of the video content on the web - mostly video on well-known video sites such as YouTube or Yahoo Video.

That brings us back to good old-fashioned web search. Can it find videos? Yes, to an extent. All the big engines have recently introduced universal search - the names they use vary - which mixes images, video, news and other types of content into their main search results listings. In other words, they've opened up more space on the first results page for media types. Can you leap from page 92 to page one by putting up video and getting listed in the universal results?

Highly unlikely. In reality, very few queries actually return images or video. The images or videos have to rank *very* high in relevancy to make it into the top results. You can even include the keyword "video" in your search query and still not get any videos in the results listings. And the problem remains that few videos outside the big video sites are indexed in the first place.

The bottom line: the easiest way for your target audience to find videos on your site is through a web search that finds the HTML page where the video lives. Put another way, the way to use videos to attract visitors is to surround them with relevant textual content and tag them correctly, so that the page where they reside can be found more easily.

First, put the entire transcript of the video, if relevant, on the same web page as the video. Put additional verbiage describing or promoting the video near where the video is embedded. Add the same alt and title attributes to the embed tag that you would to an image. InfoSearch Media also recommends putting metadata about the video directly within the HTML page as an XML island - we use an extended Dublin Core - although it's not known precisely how engines will react to this addition. This will be invisible to the browser. If you're embedding Flash-encoded video, by all means take advantage of the Flash metadata fields such as title and description. The search engines may index these fields as they rank the page with the video.

Of course, you can also put your video on YouTube, and even serve it from there. If you add good YouTube metadata (tags), people will find the video when searching either on YouTube directly, or any of the video engines. And you can provide "more information" that includes a link to bring people back to your website.

All of which is well and good, but will still play no more than a 5 percent or 10 percent role overall in increasing your website's visibility. That brings us to the second part of the SEM equation: online conversions. This is where video really shines.

Video is a great medium for providing a quick, compelling introduction to your company, product, or service. That will give consumers a good feeling about you and your brand, not to mention keeping them on your site longer, increasing the chances they'll buy. A funny or quirky video may spread virally, giving you backlinks. Such a corporate intro video demands higher production values, which can drive up the price into the thousands, but this will be money well spent. Additional lower-cost videos can be used to provide specific product or usage information, but still engage the consumer and create stickiness.

There you have it. Video is now accessible price-wise to any small or medium business owner. By all means consider video for your site, first and foremost as a way to engage and communicate to users, and to tell them about yourself and your products. Video can also have a meaningful - if not huge - traffic-generation effect if implemented correctly.

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Author, Bob Myers, Vice President of Operations for InfoSearch Media, Inc., leads a team of Web content specialists helping businesses increase Web traffic through quality search-targeted online text and Web video. Find out how informative Web Content can increase website traffic to your site with a free competitive site analysis that makes recommendations on how to dominate your particular online market segment. Or, for more information, visit our website, http://www.infosearchmedia.com.