Stupeflix Blog

If you ever wondered about Video SEO, or are interested in video as an online marketing tool, you probably came across Mark Robertson and ReelSEO. Mark is an authoritative expert and speaker on all things at the intersection of online video and search, and the founder of ReelSEO, an invaluable resource for online video professionals. We have been avid readers of the blog and are thrilled Mark was kind enough to answer our questions about Video SEO. Mark can be found on Twitter @markrrobertson.

Mark, when you founded ReelSEO back in 2007 it was the first blog focused on video SEO. Why did you think at the time this was a crucial subject?

When I created ReelSEO.com, I really intended for it to be a platform for myself to learn more about online video and how it could be leveraged in the Search Engine Marketer’s world.

Up until recently, I was the Director of Search for a privately owned media company composed of more than 100 newspaper, magazine, broadcast television, and interactive properties throughout the US. I was responsible for overseeing our company’s national search and local search lines of business.  With that role, I developed a strong focus and passion towards search engine optimization.

In 2007, I began to see video thumbnails appearing within Google’s Universal search and I wanted to learn more about how to capitalize on what I perceived was an obvious opportunity.  It quickly became apparent to me that no one was focused on this, so I created ReelSEO as a source of information for anyone that may find this trend as interesting as I did.  Thankfully, quite a few people found this trend interesting and ReelSEO has somewhat taken-off as the #1 authority for video SEO and video marketing.

When do you think will be the turning point in video SEO becoming mainstream for SMBs and online marketers?

I think that we are at that turning point.  More and more small and medium sized businesses are leveraging online video to promote their brands, products, and services.  Almost immediately after a business takes the dive into online video, one question becomes apparent – “How do I get more people to find my videos?”

What does a business need to start doing video SEO?

Produce Video…  I know, it is an obvious answer to the question but the most difficult part of doing video SEO is to actually begin creating video content for the web.  Once you have video, the rest is quite simple.

How is practicing video SEO different from regular SEO?

This is a great question.  In my opinion, being that I am a SEO professional with a background that pre-dates video SEO, I see very little difference in terms of best practices for video SEO.  In the end, video SEO is purely an extension of SEO and it is primarily about:

1.     Creating quality, engaging, and unique content.

2.     Publishing that content in a way that it can be easily indexed by search engines,

3.     And describing that content in a relevant manner that follows best practices for SEO.

The only differences at this point in time are that;

·         #2 is a bit more tricky with regard to video indexing as guidelines often change and search engines are still working to better understand Flash

·         #3 is primarily about on-page text and metadata

In the future, I see both of these differences becoming less and less relevant as search engines becoming more attuned to crawling and classifying multimedia content.  In the end, video SEO, much like traditional SEO, will be about creating great content, and publishing that content according to publishing best practices.

What are the most common misconceptions about video SEO?

I think there are a few common misconceptions about video SEO.

1.     First off, being that my background is in website SEO, I feel that video SEO should be focused more so on driving organic traffic back to the source of the video content.  As a result of this, my passion resides more so with hosted video SEO, i.e., search engine optimization of video that resides on the company’s website.  I find it odd that video distribution is often lumped within the definition of Video SEO.  Certainly, distributing video to video sharing website like YouTube is a simple and effective way to get video assets placed within search results pages.  However, to me the strategic advantage of distribution has much more to do with branding and does not as easily result in an increase of traffic to the original source.  I do think that distribution is an important consideration for increased visibility of online video content, but I hesitate to call it video SEO.

2.     Secondly, I see blog posts across the internet on a daily basis that seem to point to video SEO as a unique and almost magical way to get great rankings within search engines and generate business.  At this point in time, while it may be easy to distribute a video asset and gain high ranking in the SERPS (search engine results pages), purely ranking in search engines for a set of keywords does not always translate to an increase in business.  Additionally, as search engines mature and as more and more video content is added to the web, those that excel with video SEO will be those that create great, informative content that is relevant to their business, product, or service.