This article will outline tips for optimizing your video files to get traffic to your web site.

Check out Vab Media SEO Firm’s channels on Vimeo, Youtube and Vator.tv! The challenge for web site owners is how to integrate video into their marketing programs without losing traction in the search engines. Media delivery technology has grown faster than web search indexing methods, leaving video, media, and elements like Flash to languish in organic search. Search engines still rely primarily on text elements to sort the web. Below is a screen shot of a search query “Restaurant Insurance New York,” we made a video for our client RSI Insurance, that is now on the 1st page for this competitive long tail keyword phrase.

Search engines have started to automatically include relevant videos in search results as a way to give searchers a variety of possible results. With Google’s Universal Search integration, video seo is a relatively untapped market compared to how many text web pages are out there.  The video search engines can’t look inside the video to tell what the content is. For that reason, they rely on other on page factors, the metadata within the video file itself, the title of the video, inbound links and anchor text to determine what the video is about. There is a proper method to optimizing your video for keywords and keyterms that will lead the web searcher back to your website, and supplement your search engine results. Combine SEO with video to leverage your market and watch your  business traffic grow!  Here are a few tips to help others find you on youtube:

• Develop videos that reinforces the message of your brand.
• Create compelling content, if the content is not compelling, then the users will not share it or favorite it.
• Link back to related content and videos on your site with a keyword anchor text.
• Tag your channel with keywords related not to your content, but to what people are searching for.  To get some ideas type in a search term into youtube’s search field and see what comes up as recommendations – use those keywords.
• Tag your video with keywords.  Use the same technique above.
• Allow Users to rate your video. Search engines will pay attention to this when ranking these videos.
• Make good use of the thumbnails to help users decide which video to watch.
• Include most important keywords in the beginning of your video’s title.
• Use appropriate keywords in the link text, keyword rich anchor text carry a lot of weight.
• Start liking other videos, subscribe and friend other youtubers.

The youtube community is a pretty welcoming community. Let us know if you need any help!