I attended numerous sessions on video optimization at the recent Search Engine Strategies Conference and Expo held in New York City. Here’s a comglomeration of the best suggestions from a variety of experts on the subject. Most of these are recurring themes that several speakers agreed upon.

Use the Google Video Site map feature within Google’s Webmaster Console to submit your videos to the Big G, rather than uploading them to Google Video. Why? Because Google’s pages will outrank yours of there is duplicate content in both places.

Host your own videos on your website for the best SEO benefit. This uses bandwidth, but gives you complete control of your videos. If you have a video that goes viral and it’s not hosted on your site, you’ll be kicking yourself for it.

Relevancy in video is different. In regular search, relevancy is text based. In video, the community helps to determine relevancy - are they watching it and sharing it. How are they tagging it? The rankings often integrate ratings, click through rates, popularity, etc.

Build a separate page on your site for each video and optimize the page for it. Use appropriate title tags, keywords in your content and anchor text links to point to the pages where your videos live. Links to videos matter in the same way that links to pages matter.

Keep all your video files in one directory of your website. This makes it easier for the Search Engines to identify them. Give them good file names, as well.

Optimize your video files to the fullest possible extent. Text still rules in the Search Engines, so wherever you have the opportunity, use text to optimize your videos. This includes the metadata you associate with your videos, as well as the titles, descriptions, categories and tagging you can do when you upload them to sites like YouTube.

Create a video site map page on your website. Optimize it for video site map+keyword phrase. Create and display thumbnails on the page, along with keyword rich text.

To get a video spidered and ranking quickly, link to it from within the content of your home page. You can use the Google Optimizer to refine the best placement for it on the page.

Videos + Creative ideas = Viral Love and lots and lots of links.

Thanks to Steve Espinoza, Li Evans, Gregory Markel, Eric Papczun, Arnaud Mauvais and Jennifer Laylock for all these great insights.

Recently Mary Bowling and myself were in attendance at the Search Engine Strategies New York conference and had the opportunity to sit down and discuss our expertise with WebmasterRadio.fm’s Jim Hedger.

It was a great opportunity and we’re going to be reporting quite a bit of what we learned right here - so stay tuned. But right now here’s Mary’s interview in it’s entirety - Way to go Mary, Great job!

Webmaster Radio
Learn about Local Search Mary Bowling of Blizzard Internet Marketing on her training session at SES New York on local search Show Host: Jim Hedger Show: Search Engine Strategies Channel: Conferences

Yesterday, Blizzard’s own Carrie Hill moderated a great session at the Search Engine Strategies Conference & Expo in New York City. Small Business Blitz addressed the needs of enterpreneurs trying to promote their enterprises online while working within their small budgets.

The first panelist was Stoney de Geyter of Pole Position Marketing. Among his tips were these suggestions about determining your searchers’ intent and applying that knowledge to your optimization.

Keyword Organization

After completing your keyword research, Stoney recommends dividing your terms into categories by searcher intent. The three categories are:

• Researchers - those just beginning to research something on online or those who are only trying to learn about something and may never have intentions of buying anything.
• Shoppers - those in a phase of narrowing their focus. They think they want to buy something, but need to do more research before they are ready to plunk down their money.
• Buyers - those who know what they want and are ready to buy. At this phase, they are comparing features and prices and trying to decide who to by from.

de Geyter then suggests making certain that during optimization you match up each term and its type with a page that satisfies the needs of the type of search they have embarked upon.

Stayed tuned later for more tips from Jennifer Laylock and Matt McGee.

Google Maps continues to enable and incorporate User Generated Content (UGC).

Google Maps Reviews

You may now add reviews directly to Google Maps, rather than submitting them elsewhere and waiting for Google to pull them in to a profile. First you must sign in to your Google account.

Then, when you add a review, it posts immediately, although the total count of reviews does not immediately update.

Search Option for User-created Content

User Generated Content has been available on Google for a while, but the link to it is buried at the bottom of the local search results.

Searchers may designate which types of results they want to see by opting to Show search options in Maps.

Clicking on that link will open a box that enables you to restrict your search results to Everything, Locations, Businesses and User-created content.

This search brings up much more than reviews, although that’s exactly what many searchers are seeking. You’ll see content created on Google Calendar, and personalized saved maps - such as those on CommunityWalk, Platial and Google Maps - as well as content about the subject that Google’s found on blogs and locally focused websites, such as Topix and MerchantCircle.

Different categories seem to focus on different sources. Restaurants and hotels have tons of Google Maps, while UGC results for local plumbers have a lot of job listings.

Research your own location and niche and see what’s being pulled into the results that matter to you. Then, determine where you should focus trying to get more User Generated Content for your business.

Choose All The Right Categories

You can easily improve your rankings in Google Maps for relevant searches by making sure your business is listed in all the right categories.

In your Local Business Listing, you may specify up to 5 categories where you would like your business placed. First, choose a main classification and then a
sub classification. The main classifications are in the left box, below, and the sub classifications of Travel are in the box on the right.

Try to use all 5 categories, if you can. You may need to browse through all of the options before deciding on the best 5 places to appear. You choices may be all in one category or you might want to appear in several different ones. For example, a restaurant might choose: Restaurant-Sports Bar, Restaurant-Take Out, Entertainment-Karaoke, Restaurants-Caterers and Services-Event Planning. Or they might choose 5 subcategories within Restaurants, such as All You Can Eat, Buffets, Chinese, Thai and Korean.

Chances are , the original categories Google Maps places you in came from the placement of your business listing in the yellow pages. However, there is no strict cross-over. The yellow pages use Garbage for all things related to garbage, waste, trash and refuse. In Google Local Business Listings, the category you may choose is Services-Trash and Waste Removal and, when I search for trash, garbage or waste and my zip code, Google Maps returns the categories to the right. So , it’s pretty hard to tell what’s really what.

The good news is that categories are only one part of the algorithm for Google Maps. Therefore, if you optimize your web pages properly for the keyword terms that are relevant to your business, you have a good chance of appearing in more than the 5 categories you choose.

The Internet Yellow Pages Taxonomy

IYPs stands for Internet Yellow Pages. They are also referred to as OYPs or Online Yellow Pages. To me the most frustrating thing about trying to use them is their taxonomy or classification system, which places businesses into established categories.

While this imposes order onto what could be a chaotic system, the classifications in the phone book are very rigid and do not necessarily reflect the ways that most people search for you.

My favorite example is with medical practices. Most of us will naturally search for doctor and not for physician, and, if we know what kind of doctor we want, we will immediately search for that specifically. But what happens when you look in the Superpages for foot doctor? I see:

The IYPs obviously want to use the terms physician and surgeon instead of doctor, even though doctor is the term most people would use. If I don’t want to have surgery, have no idea what podiatry is and the big bump on my toe has nothing to do with sports, none of these will look like good choices for me. I think I’ll go search the web, instead.

And what if I have bad headaches and I don’t even know what kind of doctor go to, so I search for headache doctor.

These results aren’t very helpful to me, especially since I have a headache and am not reasoning well.  So, I try doctor for headache and the results are even less useful, as I am given the Aspen Center for Women’s Health and Aspen Center for Cosmetic Surgery. Whaaaaat? I’ll guess I’ll go see if Google Maps can help me out.

Make Your Website Speak For You 

As we talked about in part 2 of this series, Google’s trust in the information they have about your business can effect your rankings in Google Maps. Part of this trust comes from the information they gather about you enterprise when they crawl your website.

Your site should tell the Search Engines very clearly who you are, where you are and what you do. This, of course, is also very useful for your human visitors who are the customers you are trying to attract to your brick and mortar business.

Make certain the name of your business, it’s physical address (including the zip code) and a tagline that concisely explains what you offer appear in text form on your home page and on all other important pages.

Above, you can see that this web site clearly tells humans and robots that it is a Birmingham, Alabama Hotel. Then, in the footer of all their pages, they give their street address and phone number, with area code, which is another clue to give the Search Engines about where you are.