In Praise of Videos of Videos That Don’t Go Viral

This article in the New York Times gives helpful and practical tips for creating watchable, informative videos that may or may not get rapidly shared. But the hope of going viral is kind of like the hope of winning the lottery -- no matter how strategically you play the numbers it’s probably not going to happen.

That doesn’t mean businesses shouldn’t have videos -- in particular YouTube videos -- as part of their marketing mix. Of far more practical value is the opportunity to get a stronger presence in the search engines. A video, strategically targeted to search terms that reflect what you do, can:

• Give you another way to appear on the search-engine results page as Google blends video or YouTube items with the other results from the search query
• Strengthen the content on your website, helping to optimize it for search
• When uploaded to your Google Places/Google+ Local listing, optimize your business for local search (learn why local search is now so important)
• Gives you another avenue to build links to your site.

This article gives some useful tips on how to use video as a search engine tool. Some of the highlights:

• Open a YouTube channel and include in the title keywords that are relevant to what you do
• Add descriptions and video transcriptions
• Strategically use tags
• Embed your videos on your website, including text that describes the video and even include a video transcription
• Create a video sitemap.

Email me or call me at 904-744-8877 if you have any questions on how YouTube can benefit your business or simply post a comment here.