Not sure how to draw people to watch the videos on your website? Here’s our “right now” primer on video search!

There are two broad categories of video search: video sharing sites and video search engines. Generally speaking, video sharing sites allow content owners to upload videos, while video search engines index the videos from the Web, but do not host video content. Some video sites (such as YouTube) display search results only from within their own database, while others (such as Yahoo! Video Search) return results from both their hosted videos and outside websites. Many video search engines send out crawlers to index media content on the web, just like the “regular” search engines do for text content.

Video strategies can be boiled down into two approaches:

• uploading video for viewing on video sharing sites
• optimizing your video for crawling by video search engines, so that targeted traffic will visit your site to view your video content

Why would you choose one strategy over another? It’s about what you want to gain from your video content. If you care mostly about branding or “buzz”, you probably won’t mind uploading your video for the YouTube masses to see. But if you care more about people viewing ads on your website, it won’t benefit you to have your video viewed outside your site, and you’ll want your videos to be spidered and listed by a video search engine likeBlinkx.

Can you trust the video search engine spiders to find your content? We don’t think so, at least not yet. The good news is, many video search engines also accept RSS feeds from website owners.

Here’s a list of video search sites that you may want to explore for your own website:

Gravity Search Marketing’s Very Useful Video Search Submittal Chart

In our SEO book, we are very clear about the difference between the “right now” of SEO and the “eternal,” or more long-lasting, elements of SEO. Video search definitely belongs in the “right now” category. Video search engines are being bought, sold, launched, and shut down at a dizzying pace. Contact us if you have an updated link for this chart – we’d love to keep it current for our readers!

You might also be interested in learning about video search from the following sources:

• Robin Good’s Video Search Mini Guide
• Danny Sullivan’s excellent analysis and history of Video Search on Search Engine Land

If you love the Wild West, video search should be a blast for you. Good luck and Enjoy!

Q: I once had a program that would submit my website to all search engines. A person warned me about using that kind of program because the search engines will cut you off if you submit too often. Is that true?

A: We don’t have a definite answer about whether autosubmit programs will get you penalized or banned, but we can tell you that we don’t recommend doing it, and we don’t think it’s necessary.

There are only a few unique search engines with a big audience reach, and as you know from our book, those engines are Google (and AOL, which uses Google’s results), Yahoo!, MSN, and Ask.  After submitting to the biggies that allow submittals, probably the best thing for you to do is look for niche directories and sites that speak to the same audience as your site, and approach these very targeted websites for a link or listing. This method of link building helps you focus on getting the specific audience you want to your site, and doesn’t waste your time or money on audiences that are too general or too tiny. You can look on our website for a sample link letter. And of course link building is covered in the hour-a-day plan in our book.

Back to your original question, there are differences of opinion about whether oversubmitting can get you penalized by the search engines. But we would guess it can’t, because it would be very easy for someone to attempt to knock their competitors down by oversubmitting competing sites.  And we don’t think the search engines would want that to happen.

If you’re updating your blog daily, you’ve got a great start. But don’t stop there! We’ve assembled these resources to help you get the most search engine visibility for your blog

Ping Servers

• Ping-o-matic will ping several major ping servers (weblogs.com, feedster, technorati, etc.)
• Instructions for manually pinging Weblogs.com (you won’t need this if you use ping-o-matic, or if your blog software automatically pings them)
• Blo.gs ping page (you won’t need this if you use ping-o-matic, or if your blog software automatically pings them)
• A long list of additional ping servers provided by Chris Abraham

Blog and RSS Search Engines & Directories

• Rather than re-inventing the wheel and assembling all of the blog and RSS feed submittal sites on the web, here are links to our favorite compendiums of submittal links:
• RSS/Blog submittal sites
• Robin Good’s RSS submittal pages
• Toprank’s list of blog and RSS sites

Specialty Blog Directories

• Library blogs at http://www.libdex.com/weblogs.html
• Law-related blogs at blawg.org
• French blogs only at weblogues.com
• British blogs a britblog.com
• Educational feeds – unfortunately they are no longer accepting submittals: http://www.downes.ca/xml/edu_rss.htm

Blog networks

• 9rules network

SEO for Blogs – tools, tips and advice

• Profit Papers provides detailed SEO for blogs!
• Help with Google Sitemap for blogs at Cameron’s Blog.
• Pro Blogger talks about linking in blogs.
• Another Pro Blogger link with a compendium of SEO tips for bloggers.
• About.com offers Top 10 Tips on Promoting Your Blog
• Toprank has an automatic RSS feed subscription button maker that makes great little buttons so that your blog visitors can easily subscribe to your blog. They also offer a similar tool for adding social bookmark links to your blog.