V for Video SEO

19/04/10 posted by Annie

We all know YouTube got dubbed the top social media innovation of last decade, but how many people know how to capitalise on it? If you've been looking to add extra spice to your search engine optimisation (SEO) tricks, Mashable has shared some killer V(for Video)SEO secrets. After you've created your own YouTube channel and uploaded a stunning array of videos that are more enticing than mere info-mercials about your business, start thinking about your keywords. Mashable says: use the key phrase in the title twice to maximise potential - once at the start and once at the end. So, if your video was about web design, you could name your video this: "Web Design exposed - Things you never wanted to know about Web Design". Then, always include a link at the forefront of your description. This description shows up in Google search results, which means your humble link is ready to pounce on people who weren't even searching for videos!

Incidentally, speaking of videos and social media, an interview with Chatroulette's founder Andrey Ternovskiy ironically reveals his hostility about competition with other social media sites like Facebook and Skype. He is worried that people meet on his site and then exchange details to keep in touch, something he would like to discourage by adding this functionality to Chatroulette instead. He clearly states, "I don't like connecting third parties" and supplements his statement with the truism that most Chatroulette users want to keep in touch with new friends while retaining the innate anonymity of the service.

Returning to SEO and social media, Google has announced that long-forgotten tweets can now show up in your search results. Unsettling? Maybe, for those of us with age-old skeletons begging to stay in the closet. However from a strategic marketing planning perspective, it might mean an accumulation of old keywords get dug up - all pointing back to your business. Google says: users can now "zoom to any point in time and 'replay' what people were saying publicly about a topic on Twitter." Apparently Google is also searching MySpace, Buzz, Facebook and FriendFeed.

Luckily, a new platform called BirdHerd is here, making brand management easy for companies and support teams everywhere. BirdHerd boasts that it lets contributors update a Twitter account from another client, such as TweetDeck, Seesmic or even Twitter. It's much more simplistic than some of the other brand-focused clients, but that's the look they're going for. Twitter's looming Contributors feature however, might be set to rival BirdHerd and other platforms like it - with it's inbuilt capacity to do exactly the same thing.