Search Engine Traffic and Social Media Traffic
Traditionally somebody puts a keyword in, for instance, Google. Your site shows up and they arrive cold on your page. You've now got just a few seconds to grab their attention and make them want to do business with you.
Using promotional videos you can add another step to warm up your potential customers. When your "optimized" video shows up on Googles' search results, the searcher is directed to a location on YouTube or Blip.tv etc. If your presentation is compelling enough he or she will be able to see
all the videos in your "channel" and then be directed to the link to your blog or your sales page with an element of "trust" already established. Gaining this trust is the hardest thing to achieve online.
By submitting your videos to as many sites as possible you can also generate substantial traffic. Targeted traffic.
About Google's Universal Search
Online search is changing and Google and Yahoo are at the forefront. Google in the past has returned solely text based results. From my observations they were heavily into Blogs and to a lesser extent Forums in the recent past. Since the spring of 2007 they started to include images, podcasts and, from our video marketing point of view, videos from the video hosting sites.
It's obvious if someone who is looking to purchase, for instance, a food mixer, they would prefer to see a video of one in action, showing it doing exactly what the searcher wants it to do, rather than a static picture or a third party text review.
By using videos as the spearhead of your marketing campaigns you will be well positioned to take advantage of this online revolution.
Once you know what keywords are producing results for you, you will need to create new content every so often. From Google's point of view the fresher the content the better. Don't try submitting the same video with different metadata as the video hosting sites are already on top of that spam tactic.
Keywords and Tags - The Keys to the Vault
Keywords and key phrases are typically entered into a search engine to produce "search results" and associated text or video ads. Marketers spend a great deal of time and money ferreting out the words that produce a desired effect, for example sales or optins.
Tags are an alternative way of getting your content found. They could be defined as user generated keywords. The main problem at the moment is that most people on the video sharing sites and social media sites haven't a clue about using them. It's my opinion that you shouldn't get too hung up on them unless you understand their relevance and importance.
From my tests for example - youtube are more likely to show your video if your keyword/s are in the title or description. I don't think they give too much weighting to the user generated tags.
My advice would be to investigate what is happening in your niche on some social sites.
Video sites - YouTube, Google Video
Bookmarking Sites - Del.icio.us, Blinklist
Blog Directories - Technorati, Blogdigger
Typically tags are more important on your blogs, as they are used to be found on the blog directories and on the Social Bookmarking sites. So a list of the appropriate tags to target in your industry/niche would be a profitable exercise.
How to Find and Use keywords For Your Campaigns
Keywords are generally categorized as "prime keywords" or "longtail keywords". What we want is a list of "keywords" and "tags" for our campaigns. Keywords for the search engines and tags for the social sites. You need to understand the difference.
Keywords are used by searchers to find information on the search engines.
Tags are words that are generated either by someone who has created a blog or a video, or someone who has found your blog or video interesting enough to want to add it to their social bookmarks.
Bear in mind that you're not looking for thousands of keywords - just the top ones that potential customers would use to find you.
For a given campaign probably 20 or 30 carefully chosen words and phrases will be enough to get you going. Divide them into a primary and secondary list. Plan your videos accordingly.
Keyword Research
Your DIY research can be done simply by using Google.
Step 1 - Brainstorm your first list. You know your product or service better than anybody. Ask yourself what words potential customers would use to find your product. What are the problems that your product solves?
Step 2 - A quick way of researching your competitors is to put allintitle: "your keyword" into Google. This will bring back the most closely related web sites to yours.
Step 3 - Use the "view source" feature in your browser. Study the metadata in the Title, h1 (headings), description etc. and borrow a few words to build your lists.
Tag Research
The best resources are Technorati and Delicious. Particularly with Delicious you can see (with the Google toolbar) the actual Page Rank that Google hands out for every tag. Put in your keywords and look for "related tags".
Conclusion
a. Phrases are better than single words for search engine traffic. Single words are better than phrases for the video sharing tags.
b. If your business lends itself - localize your keywords. Google loves to use geographic locations.
c. Don't get hung up on keyword research tools. Use your own ideas and thoughts to generate your own unique list. What's the point in having the same keyword list as a million others.
d. Tags will probably gain more importance as time goes by and users get better at using them.
e. Google and others are working on technology that will enable them to "read and tag" individual frames. So think of the future when creating your videos.
f. Don't try and spam the video hosting and social media sites. In other words don't include words like "funny" and "weird" if they bear no relation to your content.
