Okay, you’ve read my blog posts (and hopefully my book) so you know that I recommend video as an important piece of your marketing strategy. If you missed it, understand that YouTube is the second largest search engine in the universe and throws off the best Google juice of any ‘authority’ site. Two very good reasons to have a video on YouTube.
There are dozens of other reasons to use video such as it helps keep people on your site longer (a metric that Google uses to judge the value of your website), and video does more to sell your story than any amount of text and pretty pictures.
YouTube wants to help you create better videos. They are offering the YouTube Creator Playbook that offers suggestions on how to create better, more compelling videos. The playbook also includes new strategies, tips, and optimizations.
This isn’t a fluff piece or a hype-driven con to get you to buy something. This is good stuff and I recommend that you download this free ‘how to’ guide. Check out the YouTube Creator Playbook.
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Readers of my book or this blog know that I stress the importance of words when creating a optimized article, web page, blog and forum comments, etc. Google indexes words; the words that define your content literally determine your success in getting ranked for those words. Words matter!
The Power of Words is best illustrated in this video. See how a headline modification changed the results this man was receiving.
Although this is a dramatic video intended to demonstrate the producer’s web promotional capabilities, the point it makes provides a powerful marketing lesson. It shows the power that words have to literally change your message and how it affects your audience.
When you are creating content, the words you use in your headlines, your page title, filename and body text not only sell your message to the reader, but also instructs the search engines as to the important keywords on your page.
Words also can determine your success in ‘Local Search’. If you don’t mention important words like the city in which your business is located, or the counties you serve, etc. you will not rank well for local search results. Craft the words on your page as if the survival of your business depended on it…because it does.
A viral video is one that motivates people to share it with others. When enough people tell enough people who tell other people, a video goes viral and continues until it has saturated the available audience.
What causes a video to go viral?
Is there a special formula or hot topic that determines a videos likelihood of becoming a YouTube sensation?
Is it great content? Not necessarily, if that were true, how would you explain 303+ million people who watched “Charlie bit my finger – again !“
Opinions as to what exactly makes a video go viral differ widely. Some say a video needs be funny. Others say it needs to exemplify great talent, while some believe that reality videos do the best. So what is that special something that causes a video to get shared?
It is hard to identify one particular item, but basically if you give them something to talk about…they will. If you engage your audience they will share their experience with friends and like-minded associates. Consider these two videos below. Two completely different presentations, but both make you want to share them with someone.
This video (below) is one of those that takes your breath away – literally. You’ll find yourself weaving to avoid obstacles and holding your breath when the rider leaves planet earth.
Both videos appeal to different emotions and different audiences, and both have the potential to be blockbusters. A viral video is akin to appreciating fine art. You may not know art, but you know it when you see it.
How NOT to create a viral video!
Actually, that headline should read, “How NOT to post a video on YouTube“.
Once you have your viral video contender in the can and you’re ready to post it online, don’t make the mistake that Charlie’s creator did. If you look at the YouTube screen capture below, you don’t see a link to a website. Yes, there is actually a link pointing to Charlie’s website & his Twitter account, but it is buried under the “Show more” button.
People seldom click the “Show more” link, which means that if a video does go viral, the opportunity to gain traffic, grow subscribers or make sales is severely limited. If you want to know how to optimize a video properly and leverage your social network to launch your viral video, get the SEO & Social Media Marketing Guide.
Generally speaking, many aspects of search engine optimization can sometimes take weeks or months to start seeing results. That’s the bad news; the good news is that those things we put in place today can still be driving traffic for years down the road.
As a result of Google’s new initiative involving ‘real-time search‘, it is now possible to see well-optimized assets being listed in SERPS almost immediately. To prove my point, I have a very ordinary example of how I accomplished this extraordinary feat in the past 24 hours.
SEO Refresher Course
If you follow this blog or bought my SEO book, you know that I am forever preaching that SEO is about words…and how to use them most effectively. Google indexes words and places importance on those words when they are used in a headline, as filenames and peppered tactically through the body content of a page. You have also heard me explain how valuable video can be if produced and optimized correctly.
Real world example
Yesterday evening, my bride and I were driving home after participating in the ‘Special Olympics’ parade in Whitefish, Montana. We live out in the boonies about 12 miles from town and one of the local attractions we pass along the way home is a ranch that raises buffalo and elk. As we drove by yesterday, one of the buffalo was playing ‘king of the hill’…it was an awesome sight.
As a result of attending the parade, I had my handy dandy flip-cam with me and we stopped to take a short video of this buffalo standing on top of this huge mound of snow. The buffalo cooperated and even did a trick for our benefit (I’m sure).
When I got home, I did a quick edit of our buffalo movie, added some SEO magic and uploaded it to YouTube. The next morning I did a Google search for the title of my latest Hollywood-worthy video and believe it or not, this video could be found on page one of Google with search results showing 5,400,000 other results.
How to SEO a video for YouTube
If you take advantage of Google’s “real time search“, and optimized a video using keyword specific content (title, description, tags, etc.) you can often rank well in search results almost immediately. This concept and how to make it happen confuses a lot of people, especially small businesses that take charge of their own SEO.
Although I cover the topic of video SEO and video marketing at length in my book, I decided to break this process down again and provide more detailed illustrations. Follow this link to learn how to get your video on page 1 of Google.
Okay, you’ve read my blog posts (and hopefully my book) so you know that I recommend video as an important piece of your marketing strategy. If you missed it, understand that YouTube is the second largest search engine in the universe and throws off the best Google juice of any ‘authority’ site. Two very good reasons to have a video on YouTube.
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