It has been at least 16 months since I first brought the concept of video optimization to the table. I tested my technique using some home videos from a trip to Haunted Gettysburg. After watching how this video not only dominated most video directory sites I began to see it pop up on search engine result pages. It began to show up on the first page for the search “haunted houses gettysburg”, under profile pages being indexed by search engines, from all the video directories I submitted it to. Being the thinker that I am, I saw an opportunity to limit test if you will, the search results for rank in different industries. I played around with creating lists of places that I could submit my video to, that would allow me to add a keyword rich file name, title, keyword set and description.

At this point I found a company called Tube Mogul, they had a creation that would mass submit your video to some of the nets heaviest video directories (i.e. YouTube, GoogleVodeo, AOLVideo, Myspace video. See this was where I changed how I look at search online. I figured that If I could choose a keyword or phrase that was competitive and producing ROI, use that word to anchor all the SEO for 1 video. 1 video submitted to 17-20 video directories with the same keywords,title,description and file name. Based on the ability of the search engines to index these sites like they were current news meant that I just saturated the web with 17-20 keyword rich profile pages on trusted and often indexed sites that lead back to my site. WOW, right. You can imagine how quickly this type of idea can make your head-spin, but there was one thing, would it = $$?

Well as it turns out I am working with some local Pittsburgh Attorneys and Lawyers on web development. I thought of no other industry more jaded than law to try my first video optimization. I shot a 30 second vid with my attorney, using a green screen back ground, this enabled me to re-use this video with different backgrounds. I pushed it through Tube Mogul and waited….waited….and waited about 2 days. The video started to show up on video searches for “Pittsburgh Lawyers & Attorneys” alot! I looked everyday and everyday I saw my video more and more 3 out of 10…5 out of 10…….8 out of 10! The other results were big money law firms paying big dollars to have their TV commercials posted online. I wasn’t just seeing this result in Google Video I saw the same in other video search engines and directories. I was able to create a mass of videos all the same all keyword specific and they got indexed and ranked well. Some of the Technorati vid pages even showed up on the 1st page result of google for “Pittsburgh Lawyers and Attorneys”.

With my new found power the next step was to link the video to relevant pages and watch the sites climb, and they did. I continued my exploration of the search results vs. video SEO. I submitted the same video the next month with a different background and the same keywords and guess what? I saw the same result only now guess who I was knocking out of place? My first video! HA! Now I have double the profile pages wth the same keyword rich content, do you think that one of my profiles might bledd through to the web results? They did.

In hindsight, I overlooked the real opportunity with video optimzation, monetize! This technique is great if you can figure out how to make money from it. There are still some holes in the model, like will this type of linking and saturation lead to ROI? and If this worked for video can it work for images, articles, presentations?

Time wIll Tell!

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