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Using Video to Increase Site Traffic

There are so many great reasons to use video on your site, not least of all that it’s great for search engine optimization - SEO.

Why use video?

  • It conveys  trust for your brand, showing a real presence online is important.  Visualizing things makes them seem more ‘real’.
  • You can use video to help decrease customer support by using online tutorials.
  • Video can spread like wild fire on the web - it’s so easy to syndicate on other sites by embedding through YouTube  and if people use your video they will often link back to your site as reference.
  • Visitors to your site don’t always have the time or patience to read pages of information. Often a short video will get your message across faster.

Optimize Your Video Content -  SEO Tips

Bear in mind that search engines can’t see your video content.  This is done via video sharing sites, some of which are indexed & ranked by Google & Yahoo.  YouTube. Metacafe & Vimeo are all good options and you should upload your video content to these sites as well as your own.

When uploading video to a third party site you need to carefully consider the title, description & thumbnail that you use.  This is a prime place for you to include your top keywords. Consider adding different titles and descriptions for each video sharing site.

To ensure that your site directly benefits from the video content you should also provide a text version video transcript on your own site as well as a short bullet point breakdown of the video content.  It may take an extra 15 mins to transcribe the video contents but believe me it is worth it.

If it makes sense to, include a call to action in the video.  This could be a direct call to purchase or simply an encouragement for the viewer to visit your site for further information/content.

Track Your Video Content

You know I love measurability.  Track your video content with a tool such as Tubemogul.   You can also keep tabs on the number of comments, ratings and views on individual videos to measure your success.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, May 14th, 2009 at 8:04 pm and is filed under Search engine marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

4 Responses to “Using Video to Increase Site Traffic”

  2. Capt. Benjamin says:
    May 16, 2009 at 4:59 pm

    Good information here! I hope to begin integrating some presentations of mine into my leadership blog to show effective (and ineffective) ways of communicating.

    I like your idea about using different titles for the same video on different storage sites. You never know what someone will do a search for when they are looking for your material.

  3. Thousands will WANT this if you OFFER it to them… | homecenterjob.com says:
    May 16, 2009 at 5:16 pm

    [...] Using Video to Increase Site Traffic « Liv Large: Online Marketing … [...]

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