That is a great start

• Text nearest the video code should be keyword heavy.
  
• Make sure to link to the page with keywords.
  
• The first and last frame of the video should have keywords on the screen. (newer vid engines like blinkx will ocr and read them)
  
• Load the video at video sharing sites and include the url to the video at your site in the meta keywords if they allow you to add them.
  
• Check the format you are using to see if it allows embedded Meta Data. If it does - load it up with keywords.
  
• Engines will block videos loaded via a popup.

Upload to all the locations you can. You can put up a preview clip and give some away with the tagline: "see the full clip an http...".

Hit sites such ast, AOL UnCut, DailyMotion, Google Video, MetaCafe, MSN, MySpace Video, Ifilm, Revver, Yahoo! Video, Soapbox, and ye classic YouTube.

I think that uploading to as many palces as you can is also probably a very good plan. However. It's liable to then spam video search results with duplicates of the same video if you are not careful. This is a bit of a dilemma, becuase places like Youtube are ecosystems in their own right - so putting your video there makes sense, as well as on your own site, but in doing so you meed to consider the effect on your compane's brand if the brand is big.

Another option is to put the video up at all these places, but try and vary the tags and descriptions, but that again depends on the video content. I feel that somehow putting the video everywhere feels a bit like submitting to 20,000 directories at the touch of a button.

I confess that at the moment, I'm putting the video up on You tube and a few others, put putting the Youtube link on my own site. I think the video carries more weight as Youtube branded than it does without at the moment. (It also streams better on their servers!)

Then again - I am not pretending I have cracked Video optimisation. Just playing at the edges really.

I think that uploading to as many palces as you can is also probably a very good plan. However. It's liable to then spam video search results with duplicates of the same video if you are not careful.

The best way to prevent that is by recording the video yourself. That way nobody will have the same copy!

sure, like the guy who's blending the iphone, everybody seems to have this video on his/her blog/site.

I really like Brett_Tabkes's list especially this pointe here: Text nearest the video code should be keyword heavy.

Nowadays I have a problem with language of my video.

My video, what is lodged in youtube, only it goes out in the searches for google.com and not for Google.es
In Google.es's results one sees " translate this page " though the page is completely in Spanish.

How can I solve it?

[edited by: Errioxa at 2:14 pm (utc) on July 24, 2007]

Check the format you are using to see if it allows embedded Meta Data. If it does - load it up with keywords.

Anyone have any tips on which formats actually support this?

Since Macromedia Flash 4, Flash has had a mechanism that will export the text within a movie into the HTML file published with a SWF file. This information, contained in the HTML of the page embedding the Macromedia Flash SWF is what a search engine looks for when indexing the page.

[kb.adobe.com...]

While there are all kinds of formats you can use for publishing video on the web, I think .FLV /.SWF and accompanying HTML is the way to go.

Does how you embed a video on a page have an impact on video indexing?

Let's say you've set up alternate (non-video) content in HTML and then use something like SWFObject to replace the alternate content with the Flash movie using Javascript... I've always thought this was a best practice - it gives the spider something to chew on and it's friendly to the 5% of people who don't have Flash...

But I can see where it could complicate things for video search optimization since the .flv (the actual video) is called by the .swf player, and the .swf isn't actually in the HTML of the page - only put there via Javascript/SWFObject - and we know the spiders aren't fond of Javascript...

If using SWFObject is good for getting the _page_ indexed, what's the best way to embed Flash video to get the _video_ indexed and still avoid the problems in IE that were the result of the Eolas lawsuit?

In the same way that the SE's could never really "see" the content of a static image, (.GIF, .JPG, .PNG), and relied on context and ALT= tags, I think it will be a long time before the SE's are actually looking at the source (.FLV) for anything more than patterns that indicate copyright infringement.

Brett's points for how to put the video in the proper context are all we have to work with --- links, titles, surrounding text, etc..

Is anyone under the impression that (any) SE's actually attempt to read the .SWF or .FLV data?

Point taken, but if the video is put on the page with Javascript, will they even know the video is there?

Is the only way to have them pick up the video to use an MRSS feed? How important will they think it is if they can't see any pages using it?

Point taken, but if the video is put on the page
with Javascript, will they even know the video is there?

It's the method YouTube uses...

The OCR tip is sommat I'd not thought of before - Excellent tip Brett!

> ocr tip

Also consider the audio track. EveryZing and Blinkx are running voice recognition to text over the audio track. The resulting transcript is about 80% accurate (poor, but improving). That transcript ends up getting posted on EveryZing indexed by the search engines. Speak the title of the video slowly at the beginning of the video. Not sure how, but there seems like some way you could get a url in there?

> embedded

All the major formats allow meta data. Avi, flash, wmv, and qtime all allow it. Often, it is buried under "properties" or "owner info" on your video editing application.