LBi London

Video distribution

Posted by Ian Macfarlane June 3rd, 2010

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

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Video Optimisation

Posted by Rik Stewart May 28th, 2010

In this post in our series covering frequently asked questions, we are going to look at optimising video for search.

Faster internet connections have meant that video is a viable option everywhere on the web.

The top three search engines all now include video as part of their main results. Including video can benefit a website and its users in a variety of ways.

However, for video to be effective from an SEO point of view, it needs to be correctly optimised for search. Video content, like images, cannot be “seen” by search engine spiders. Therefore, if a video contains information that is important for the ranking of the page, your site needs to be optimised to point the search engines to the video content. This, in turn, will make it easier for users to find your video in the search engines.

Ideally, before you even make the video, you should make a list of the keywords that you want to target. The video meta data should target these keywords and, at the very least, the title, description, keywords, category, duration and a suitable thumbnail should be included.

There are two main types of meta data that can be employed: XML feeds and HTML markup.

For XML feeds, we generally recommend using Media RSS rather than Video Sitemaps, as the Media RSS format is more widely supported.

For HTML markup you can use either the Facebook Share format or the SearchMonkey RDFa  format. The advantage of using HTML markup is that it may result in your site getting enhanced snippets in the search engines. However, we recommend using both an XML format and an HTML format, as different web services will support different formats.

Each video should have its own page, which should be optimised for keywords relating to the video. This would include titles, headings and meta data. We also recommend adding a summary of the video, which includes these keywords. Both the URL of the page embedding the video and the video file itself should be descriptive and should also include the most important keywords. Another useful addition is a video transcript, which is beneficial for both accessibility and SEO. This transcript can be included on the page in which the video is embedded, in addition to (or in place of) the summary.

The length of the video can also be very important. Short videos are generally better received than long videos. If a longer video is necessary, consider breaking it up into multiple smaller clips or episodes. This will work better for some videos than others – you don’t want to break up a feature film, but creating a series of informational videos that each answer a different question well is often better than creating  a long sprawling video about the entire topic. Web users are known not to be very patient when waiting for videos to buffer. In fact, research by TubeMogul showed that 81% of online video viewers clicked away if a clip rebuffered, so shorter segments are more likely to be watched.

The final important issues to consider are how to host and distribute your online video – we will cover these topics in a separate article next week.

Tags: best practice, meta tags, microformats, search, SEO, video

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Quick, quick – quick, quick – slow-mo

Posted by Simon Gill October 6th, 2009

And all with added FCP filters, not to mention a red, white and orange colour palette.

China’s 60th Anniversary national day – timelapse and slow motion – 7D and 5DmkII from Dan Chung on Vimeo.

Tags: China, video, Vimeo

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A proper f*&k1ng film

Posted by Simon Gill October 6th, 2009

So there I was looking at Warp Records site for some artist information for a welcome email about our new team member – welcome Chris L – who has Warp form.

Staring me in the face was the ugly mug of Le Donk (aka Paddy Considine) – a fellow long haired chancer – in his new film – a project shot over five days with no script, no funding and an extremely small crew. Apparently it’s out this month – in cinemas and DVD – but a quick search on the interweb reveals it previewed back in 2007 on Donkensteiner’s YouTube channel. So I’m hardly at the cutting edge on this one. Shame on me.

Also on Rotten Tomatoes plus some Le Donk wisdom with his top ten films. Step a side Ze Frank.

The above is directed by Shane Meadows – who can be a bit hit and miss – but he does know his original Fila tracksuits. So Le Donk and Scor-Zay-Zee – you brightened up my day. You also provided an interesting contrast to this Martin Scorsese and this Hitchcock inspired ad I referenced yesterday.

Tags: Le Donk, Scor-Zay-Zee, Scorsese, video

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