Video + SEO = Best Practices for Video & E-Commerce

Last week, I had the honor of speaking at the first annual Liveclicker Video Commerce Summit in Seattle, WA. I was asked to discuss and present video search engine optimization and to help educate the audience on best practices for publishing online video in a search engine friendly manner. The title, was Video + SEO – Not Smoke and Mirrors, Just Best Practices for E-commerce Video Publishing. With that in mind, there are slides that are specifically geared towards e-commerce but the concepts and tactics apply across the board for publishing online video.

Why Video + SEO vs. just Video SEO?

You may be asking, why the “Video + SEO” vs. just “Video SEO?” Well, I get into that a bit more in the slides and without going on too much of a tirade about it – here is what I will say. I think that there is a lot of hype these days about Video SEO and it seems to me that there is an overall lack of understanding as to what effective Video SEO is. As for my definition, and I go a bit more into this within the presentation:

“Video SEO is the application of SEO best practices when publishing online video content to ensure maximum visibility across search engines and ultimately, your target audience”

While there are some clear advantages to utilizing video for search rankings; really, I feel that the focus should be on best practices as an overall strategy for both website development as well as video publishing.

Just as in the early days of SEO, there were techniques for getting easy rankings, with spamming meta keyword tags, multiple domain cross-linking strategies, etc… That soon disappeared and as most experts will tell you, the best lesson for SEO in general, is to create unique and valuable content, and to publish that content with best practices for SEO in mind. Nothing works as well for SEO as creating good, unique, and valuable content.

The same should be said about online video. Video SEO is not a means in and of itself, it is a strategy and a set of best practices that needs to be combined with best practices for producing, publishing, and syndicating online video content. Many of these best practices have already been established for SEO in general. Leveraging those best practices along with publishing quality video content is what good Video SEO is all about… OK, so I did go off a bit, didnt I?

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