Video SEO: the new frontier

I discovered a great resource this week – www.reelseo.com – which, as its name suggests, is a blog all about video for the web.

They’ve been calling this year ‘the year of the Smartphone’ since about 2008 when the first iPhone’s came out. It’s telling that people are consuming video content about 25% more on their mobiles than their PC’s or Notebooks.

It’s also proven that adding video to your eCommerce site increases conversions dramatically.

With the rise of HD video capability in Smartphones and DLSR’s, high quality video content is being created at an astonishing rate.

For eCommerce retailers, there’s almost no excuse for not including video in your online store, especially if you’re shooting your own product photography (or getting someone else to do it). Most digital cameras have video capability, so why not also shoot some video of your products while you’re shooting stills?

I saw one example recently where a guy simply shot a product video while sitting at his desk. So simple and easy to do, and you don’t have to worry about your ‘head being on telly’ if you’re shy! Plus it’s a really cheap technique.

The other trick to using video on your own website is to syndicate it so it becomes a doorway for people to find a path back to your site (or product page).

I really love www.tubemogul.com for its ability to allow you to upload once and distribute out to dozens of video sharing websites such as Metacafe and YouTube.

Make sure your videos contain an SEO’d description as well as lots of content about the video with a link back to the page on your website where it also appears. Don’t forget to tag them too!

Probably the next big frontier in online video is Google TV; and it’s now more important than ever to create a Video Sitemap if you host video content on your own website.

Google’s been educating webmasters for awhile now about Video Sitemaps; they offer the facility in Google Webmaster Tools, which allows you to help Google find and index your videos.

That’s also great for Universal search results.

It appears that Google is very keen to discover as much video content as possible to ensure Google TV is brimming over with findable content.

At the moment on regular TV, advertisers occasionally try and match up their TV ads with relevant TV programming; sports broadcasts like golf do a pretty good job at advertising to a relevant audience. However, most of the time, TV ads are still pretty ‘shot-gunned’ and aren’t especially relevant to the program you’re watching.

I’m positive the folks at Google are eyeing off the big advertising dollars they’ll get if people really start using Google TV in a big way. Contextual ads alongside relevant video content must be a mouth-watering proposition.

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Chris Thomas heads up Reseo, a search engine optimisation  company which specialises in creating and maintaining Google AdWords campaigns and Search Engine Optimisation campaigns for a range of corporate clients.