18^th Feb 2009.  Moderated by Li Evans, the Podcast SEO session introduced veteran search marketers Amanda Watlington and Joe Morin. 

Amanda commenced with the question:  Who is listening to podcasts anyway?  They are not as prominent in the Search results as video so why bother?  Amanda shared 2008 data on this which indicates that the UK is No. 3 in penetration in 2008.  There are 7.5 million video users within the UK and 20.6% have downloaded a podcast. The UK is the 5^th largest in market size in 15-64 age range.  That has a massive impact.

Who is watching video?  What are they doing with it?  According to Comscore, 27million people watched video in the UK last year, with 3 billion videos watched online.  This equates to 118 videos per month per viewer, 19.7 million viewers watched 1.4 billion videos on YouTube. 

The UK watched an astounding 161 million hours of video content in 2008.  Are you leveraging this?

Adding video and audio is compelling for both the brand marketer and search marketer.  The Brand Manager is ‘challenged with creating brand personality, engagement and loyalty in an increasingly fragmented media ecosystem’ according to Watlington.  The advantages of podcasts are that it creates a direct communication channel, adds new media outlets accessing audiences that are unavailable via traditional broadcast media.  Podcasts create engagement through emotional connection with target market:  there is nothing like a sound or moving image.

For Search Managers, they are challenged to achieved SERPS.  The proof is in the search results:  video content, audio content for music. 

So, how do we look at video and audio? What should you do?  Host or Post?  A simple resources question will answer this:  who takes the bandwidth hit? 

• 1. Host it – optimise it!
• 2. Post it – YouTube – optimise for uploading

Hosted video:  challenges.  No clear standard format on video.  Sites are advised to include a player.  Most users do not know where to look for video so make it clear where to look on your site.  Make sure it is there.  YouTube, Google video, Yahoo, etc. get most of the ‘noise’.  Do SEO appropriate to your own site as better to rank there.  The benefits of hosting it yourself include:

• Generates traffic to your site
• Generated links
• Combine with posted video for greater reach
• You have control over: metas, context, content, advertising, monetisation

Duplicate content screens do not yet screen out the combination of a hosted / posted video solution, so at present there is no disincentive to both host it and post it yourself.

Tips and tactics

Offer videos in multiple format, tags and descriptions, site keywords, video sitemaps, etc.  Amanda then gave an example of video optimisation in action via the Web Marketing Today interview of Amanda Watlington, herself, with Ralph Wilson.  She advocated:

• creating a video with branding in it;
• write clear titles and descriptions
• Create tags to identify subject
• Add social bookmarking options, send to friend, etc.
• Avoid pop up players

SOUND:  Podcast SEO

This, according to Amanda, is not a challenge of technical proportions, but of planning: “Getting from ‘ere to ear”

Plan the implementation carefully, optimisation of audio files, optimise your landing pages, build effective RSS feeds for distribution, tactics to market to audience.  So before you begin you need to make certain decisions.  Consider:

One off?  Series? Online entertainment?  You will make different decisions based upon this answer.  This will drive how you name the show.  Make sure you do not employ a name that is already in use as changing the name is difficult once you already have an audience.  Change episode names – each episode will need its own title and description.  Carefully write these for both shows and episodes.  Decide whether you transcribe or abstract what is on the podcast.  Transcribe if possible. 

Preparation:

• Devise a keyword list – this will give insights into branding.
• Write the audio tag information and determine how you will brand it.
• Get album art ready even for non musical shows
• Write the audio tag info carefully in advance
• Be prepared to edit the audio tags yourself or carefully build a set of protocols

Joe Morin, Storybids, of ‘that’ viral Superbowl proposal infamy was next to take the podium to share his wealth of experience on video optimisation and the power of viral video. 

It is getting more important for companies to have a video strategy as it offers an amazing amount of branding opportunities.  Are businesses aware that 39% people find video via the search engines?  In google universal search, video now dominates.  Comscore fact: 58% people saw a video result in January 2008… and these videos are increasingly found on the search engines and not on Social Media sites.

Like Amanda before him, Joe covered the hosting or posting question and indicated the benefits of hosting:

• Control over on page text, encoded metadata, user experience, etc
• Control over monetisation / advertising and analytics
• Generate traffic to your site

While you can currently dominate the serps, with carpet bombing posting strategies, this may go away with duplicate content filtering in the future.  There is a 268% increase in views of a video through submitting to more than one search engine / video aggregator.

Morin stressed the need to tell search engines what is in video content.  One excellent tip he gave to companies looking to do this was to add the word ‘video’ in the filename – giving the user what they are searching for by answering their search query – ‘video on….’.  Search engines are not great at indexing meta data for video, but they are getting better and it is important to include this. 

 Your site structure when using video:

• Not to use popup video – embed
• Place your videos in root folder / directory
• 1 video per URL
• Create navigation and links

Social media is very much alive with video SEO, says Morin.  Include social book marketing tabs, enable comments, get interactions and get the video shared.  So, how do you get into the search engines? 

• Most video search engines accept RSS / MRSS feeds. 
• Use the media aggregators.  
• Google launched video sitemaps XML in December 2007.  Use them! 
• Provide a thumbnail URL
• Set video:player to embed
• Use analytics – e.g. Visible measures, analytics company to track views. Etc
• Video sharing:   put URL in the start of the description. 
• Youtube annotations – can click over to a different video.  Grab additional traffic. 

Search Engine Strategies London is being held for the second year running at the Business Design Centre, Islington.  A stylish venue buzzing with attendee’s enthusiasm for what promises to be a valuable and exciting 3 days for website owners, marketing directors and digital online managers.

Day 1 kicked off with a conversation with Matt Mason, author of The Pirate’s Dilemma - a blog-turned-book about the way that contemporary culture can start a movement, drive innovation, push the boundaries of any technological medium.  Mason discussed how the humble beginnings of a cool idea can drive both social change and business change and how businesses can and are leveraging this power.

After a welcome coffee, networking and the opening of the exhibits, visitors could then choose from 3 quality sessions covering Multilingual SEO, blended search and Google Universal and an update on search marketing moderated by the venerable Bill Hunt with Anne Kennedy and Cesar Mascaraque from Ask.com. 

One of the fundamentals close to the heart of SES is networking:  attendees are encouraged to interact with each other and develop business relationships.  Companies looking for a digital marketing company or other provider can interview prospective suppliers and can develop their knowledge further by talking to industry experts.  Additionally, visitors could get information about their sites from the site clinics run by Shari Thurow and Matt Bailey of US companies Omni Marketing and SiteLogic, respectively.

Highlights of the afternoon included Recession-proof Performance Marketing plus, of course, the orion panel on measuring success, a vital indicator as to the success of your online campaign, an update on online video from Greg Jarboe, Li Evans and Shari Thurow.  The late sessions (5-6) offered a dip into analytics and mobile search.  All in all, an excellent first day for London SES. 

Whereas today we just enjoyed the show, tomorrow we will be covering selected individual sessions in depth to bring tips and tactics that can be implemented into your online marketing campaign.