Video search is exploding. Not only teenagers, but also their parents and their grandparents hang out on YouTube. But, according to Chris Sherman, “Optimizing for video search is currently at the stage where regular web search was in, I would say, 1994.”

So how do you proceed if you want to benefit from the boom in video search?

The quotation from Chris Sherman is from his introduction to the session Video Search Optimization at Search Engine Strategies New York 2007. Here are the top tips from the very knowledgeable presenters at that session.

“Keywords and anchor text is king”

Eric Papczun from Performics presented some practical advice for optimizing video content for search engines.

The starting point is that images are not indexed, so the text on the web page is what the search engines will have to go on and it is what you need to use to make your video content found. The top 3 tips in answer to these facts are:

• Avoid flash pop-up players. If you need to use a flash player, surround it with HTML.
• Cross-link to your other relevant videos, using keywords in anchor text.
• Use keywords in file names.

Another tip is to consider adding a MPEG version of your videos for downloading for use with video iPods or mobile phones.

Go beyond accidental fame

Right now, people find videos online mostly by buzz – word of mouth, Digg, del.icio.us, blogs and even emails. This was the starting point of the presentation by Sherwood Stranieri, search marketing director, Performics Online.

Thanks to viral marketing, a popular video page can be a great asset, a traffic magnet. For many web site owners, lot of this is accidental fame. What do you do to systematically benefit from YouTube fame?

1. Stranieri suggests a teaser strategy: Upload a few videos to YouTube and keep the rest on your site. The videos should be related and should link to each other. It’s not enough to be famous on YouTube. You want a cycle that keeps feeding you traffic so you keep getting visitors who see your products, your ads etc.
2. Use pages that combine HTML and the actual video player. Have a detailed article on the same subject, so the search engines have content to index. And remember to list related videos.
3. If you have accidental video fame like Mentos and Diet Coke http://youtube.com/watch?v=YNgl6z5Z7k4, make more videos in the same genre to get the most out of it. Don’t fake it. Make it about a real experience by real people.

It’s a free lunch!

Gregory Markel of Infuse Creative emphasized that video search is important because it’s free and it’s popular. There is no cost per action attached to viewing videos that could do a good job at marketing your brand.

People who search for videos are often searching for brands. Be sure that your site shows up when they search for your brand. One step to achieving this is keeping important keywords in the first part of your sentences and descriptions.

We are also starting to see companies out there that can help your videos’ popularity by tagging, commenting and bookmarking them on different social networks to help you be visible on MySpace, del.icio.us etc.

Once your video is popular, it is important that your brand is visible, even if the video is viewed on YouTube or an iPod. Remember to:

• Make the 1st frame of the video contain your brand and homepage URL.
• Make the last frame contain a call to action.
• Watermark the video with your logo for branding, but also to prove ownership of the content.

Where do you need to be visible?

This is where people go to watch videos:
Youtube 43 % (growing)
Myspace 14% (losing traffic)
Google video 7% (losing traffic)

These are the top video search engines:
Google video: 68%
Yahoo video: 21%
AOL video 8%

The numbers of video searches are so huge that even the smaller services can deliver significant traffic. Consider sites like V Social and Bllinx.

More of Pandia’s Search Engine Strategies coverage.