Now that you know how to optimise your videos for search it’s time to distribute them across the web.
Following from last week’s post about video SEO, this week’s post covers how to distribute your videos across the web and track their performance.
Whilst you can host video files on your own site and submit them to video search engines (Google, Yahoo!, Bing, Blinkx etc.), YouTube is the 800 lb gorilla in the video space. The only way in which your video will be found by people searching on the YouTube website is if you upload the video to YouTube itself.
Using YouTube also has additional benefits – YouTube automatically creates Media RSS feeds, which you can use to submit the video to search engines, and it also makes hosting of videos effectively “free”. However, the Media RSS feeds that YouTube provides link back to the YouTube page, not to the page on your site.
Therefore, we recommend hosting your videos on your own site as well as on YouTube. You can then generate your own Media RSS feeds (linking back to your site) and submit these feeds, rather than the YouTube feeds, to the various video search engines. If hosting videos on your own site, it may also be useful to provide the video content in multiple formats – the more formats in which the video is available, the larger the potential audience (although more formats also means additional costs in both time and bandwidth, so there is a definite trade-off involved).
It may be worth uploading the video to other video hosting platforms, such as Dailymotion, MetaCafe or Vimeo, as well as to YouTube.
When uploading your video to video hosting sites like these (as opposed to submitting it to video search engines), we recommend watermarking the video with the brand name to prevent it from being re-used without attribution.
Most video hosting sites allow you to include a URL along with each video – each video that you upload to a third-party site should ideally link back to the page on your site on which the video is hosted.
It is also a good idea to embed the URL of the page on your site where the video file is included within the video itself. Short URLs are generally better, as users will have to manually type them in. URL shortening services which support tracking of users are particular useful here: they can allow you to track users who visit your site after watching one of your videos, and identify which of your videos and which video hosting sites are attracting the most visitors.
Tags: best practice, Google, search, SEO, video