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Jean-Marie Bonthous, Seamless Social

Video SEO is 5300% more likely than articles to get you first page on Google
A study by Forrester Research indicated that videos, if properly submitted to search engines (and more often than not, they are not properly submitted) are 53 times more likely to rank you on Google’s first page than traditional SEO techniques.
Video SEO, if properly done, is a great way to attract visitors to your web site.
Video, when published and promoted property, are a great way to boost your content marketing ROI.

According to another story by eMarketer, 40% of viewers discover videos through search engines. By 2015, 76% of internet users will watch video online. In the same period, online video advertising spending will surge from $1.97 billion to $5.71 billion.

Let’s look at the 7 prevailing myths about SEO marketing, and at what the facts really are. Social media optimization helps people want to share your content.

Myth #1: It is important to generate search results in the “video” section
The video section is considerably less valuable than the default “web” section of search engines, as it generates a lot less search volume and click-through. It is important to appear in the blended search section. I will explain later (Secret #1) why and how this happens.

Myth #2: Search engines recognize video content easily
Their bots and crawlers have difficulties recognizing Flash content. For the content to be served, they need to be submitted and you need to follow the XML-serialization of each search engines.

Myth #3: Video publishing automatically provides strong SEO benefits
If you publish on YouTube and embed the code on your on other web sites, the viewers will be directed to YouTube, not to the sites where the code has been embedded.

Myth #4: There is no downside to posting a video on YouTube
YouTube belongs to Google, and when you sign up with YouTube, you agree that any content you upload on YouTube now belongs to Google, to whom you are relinquishing all copyright.

Myth #5 If you submit an XML feed to a search engine, it’s good for other search engines
How you configure the XML feed (“Serialization”) is different for each search engine. What you do for Google will not make your video more prominent on Bing and vice-versa. You need to ask each search engine for their specific guidelines on submission. For your videos to appear, you may need to adjust the pagination, the feed size, and more.

Myth #6: Search engines do not discriminate between types of content
Search engines give a higher ranking to video content than to other forms of content. This enables them to keep serving searches that are a well-balanced blend of different media. What works for you is that there is a plethora of word content, but little video. So if you publish videos, your chance of being served by the search engines is high, providing you are properly indexed.

Myth #7: You need to submit the page where your video is displayed, or the vide itself.
You need to do both. Many sites make the mistake or submitting either the page, or the video. Few submit both. Do this the property way: use a permalink sitemap mirroring your XML feed. And make sure that the title tags on your permalink pages are the same as in the video title, in order to achieve the highest possible rank scoring. It is crucial to make sure that the links point back to your site, so that traffic reaches where you want it to go. Both the permalink pages and the videos should be indexed, and you also need to have the correct robots.txt files. Last but not least you will need to include on your site a piece of code that will enable redirected content from your video provider.

Does video SEO sound overly complicated? There is an easier way. I found two tools.
On the affordable side ($19.90 a month), Smart-Video is a great tool to quickly and cost effectively get video thumbs to appear along side your most valuable listings in Google blended searches and to allow easy sharing of video content in Facebook. They offer a 30-day trial.
On the more upscale end of the spectrum, Fliquz offers unlimited submission to search engines, video upload and management and unlimited transfer up to 1TB, all this for HQ. 16:9. This service is available for $99/month to their Silver of Gold customers

Are you using another platform for video SEO? What have you learned? We would love to hear from you.

Video courtesy of Search Engine People’s Blog via Flickr and Creative Commons