SEO & Videos

[keyon]

I have to disagree. The whole point is to get sales.

You might be wanting your page to do too many things. Making sales is one thing. Getting organic traffic from search engines is something else.
If you want a super-focused, high-converting webpage that has nothing on it but a video, maybe your traffic should come from somewhere else -- like from a page that is optimized for search engines (with text), PPC ads, affiliates, or other websites.

I take it no one has come up with a solution to this problem yet.

Yeah...it is kind of problem, in regard to how well search engines can interpret the information on a webpage. It's the same dilemma with images. A picture might be worth a thousand words, but it's all lost on search engines. I suppose there are special html tags you can use with video (like with images) to help describe the invisible content, but I'm not sure I would rely too much on that.

[snakeman]

Dear all, I found out the hard way that videos and SEO do go togeather.
As owner of the registered “snakeman” and “snake man” trademarks, I was able to maintain number one on search results without too much difficulty as most people in my business (wildlife education) were ethical and didn’t market themselves using my name.
Anyway, back in about mid 2008 a newly licenced operator decided to milk my business and good name by bootlegging the trademark and optimising his site with on and off page SEO.
As soon as I dropped from one on google, the incoming calls turned off like a tap and I was inundated with complaints about the imposter.
Out went the cease and desist letters commencing Jan 2009, and then I decided to outgun him on two fronts, namely my own SEO efforts and keeping an eye on his own website’s SEO.
He tried all sorts of black hat methods to maintain primacy and succeeded for over two years in maintaining number one position and taxing my business to the tune of several hundred thousand dollars in lost income.
He had agreed to cease and desist using the trademark, but was hooked on the income he was stealing from me, so made sure he remained number one of the organic (SEO) results.
Eventually in mid 2011 I looked more closely at his site and it’s SEO and found that he had backlinks all over the place, but of relevance here was that the overwhelming majority were ones he’d placed on video sites such as youtube, for which he had over 800 youtube pages, each with backlinks to his webpage for the term “snakeman”.
I petitioned youtube to remove the sites on the basis of trademark violation, which they did and this single act was enough to knock him from number one for all searches, to allow my site to (properly) replace his position.
See the full story at:
http://www.smuggled.com/trademark-in...l-webpages.htm
But please note it took google and bing several months to recognise the dead backlinks and alter their results accordingly.
I have now briefed lawyers in terms of the trademark thief for these trademark breaches, others, defamation and a raft of other stuff.
But what became clear was that google rates video sites highly and backlinks from them also rate highly.
In terms of SEO for videos themselves, I have seen it written elsewhere and agree it’s true, that if you name your video in terms of what you want it to rate for in search, it is a reasonable form of SEO.
I uploaded a video with the exact words trademark infringement, the url is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYfWkM8Ls10 and it comes first or second in most google searches for videos for the term, ahead of the many advertising type videos by law firms.
All the best
Snakeman

[ep2012]

Sorry to hear of your troubles.

But I'm talking about replacing my copy with just a video on my site. It's not the same thing as this guy did (I think), as he was putting URLs on videos on YT.


Michelle

[LD]

I, for one, don't usually have time to watch an entire video, even if it's selling something I may be interested in. I'm more of a "scanner" and would rather scan a page for what I need and decide to buy or leave. I'd say, along with a video, you should include text for information, added "sales" (call to action) and the for the optimizing part. Then the visitor has the option to view the video or scan the page for what they need.

[ep2012]

k, maybe what I'll do is offer them one or the other & have them click on one or the other.

Thanks


Michelle

[snakeman]

LD, I think most people (including myself) are like you and only "scan" videos and the like. That's what our adversary counted on with his backlinks. That no one would actually see the videos (all short cuts of rubbish), and yet the backlinks had full link juice.
Which also gets me to another issue.
Most of the video sites have "no follow" on the backlinks but I can say from here the search engines are counting them (I assume the sites are already indexed).
We know this because in the absence of other factors and when we killed over 800 of these no follow links on youtube the offending site dropped from one on all major search engines, (where it had stuck for two years like glue), to way down the page on most SERP's.
All the best
Snakeman

[williamc]

If you are absolutely dead set on removing the copy that is the foundation of any rankings, then think <noembed> and stick the relevent copy in there...

personally, if a page ONLY has a video telling me about it, I generally close the page rather quickly.... IMO: video helps the conversion, but thats in conjunction with the text that I can skim for specifics.

[LD]

The video should usually accommodate a title, a description or summary, and some keywords or tags. For more video optimization read this article. I found this article in google.

I got an email alert for this?? Did you even read any of the posts, never mind reading the thread from beginning?

[#ElsonOnDemand]

I have to disagree...Michelle

A/B Testing is a simple way to see how well your page is converting. Using Google analytics to see what visitors are landing on. You can use CSS and jQuery to organise content around the video so long as the title, metas and h1, h2 tags are accurate and the page has already been crawled it should be easy to tweak your pages to stike the right balance (the rules of writing a good elevator pitch will still apply). Hope this helps.

[TrafficProducer]

IMHO which is not even worth 2 cents this, and it is Tongue in Cheek

I guess you want to get tons of subscribers, (don't pay). But just drink 25 cups of strong coffee before shooting video, talk daft and be no older than 25 years

This seems to work looking at YT