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Major Video Search Engines (and How To Get Into…

September 18, 2007
by Gradiva Couzin

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

Name	Spider or Upload?	Accepts RSS Feed?
YouTube	Upload	No
Blinkx	Spider	Yes (submit MRSS)
Google Video	Both	Yes, (Google’s video sitemap instructions)
Yahoo!	Both	Yes (submit MRSS)
AOL Video	Both	Yes (via Truveo)
Microsoft’s Bing Video Search	Spider	Yes (via Truveo)
Altavista	Spider	No (Possibly powered by Yahoo! Video)
Purevideo	Both	Yes
Searchforvideo	Both	Yes
Brightcove	Upload	No
Gofish.com	Upload	No
Vimeo.com	Upload	No
Dabble.com	Spider	No, but can be added manually (login req’d)
Clipblast	Spider	Yes (submit MRSS)
Joost	Neither (Content partnerships only)	No

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!

ask the experts

Ask the Experts: Do I Need Both Singular and…

September 7, 2007
by Gradiva Couzin

Q: If I’m using a keyword such as “planet orbiter” or “planet orbiters”, do I need to focus on both words for meta searches, PPC, etc. or can I focus just on “planet orbiters” and trust that a good enough campaign will yield results for the singular “planet orbiter” search as well?

A: Since search engines recognize a difference between singular and plural words, we think it is best to represent your keyword in both singular and plural forms on your website.

Despite Google taking great pride in the fact that it returns meaningfully different results for “apple” and “apples” (people searching for the single word “apple” are more likely to be seeking the company and not the fruit), for the vast majority of searches, most people would agree that there isn’t a whole lot of meaning in the difference between singular and plural searches. If you think that your searchers could be querying both words, you should optimize for both too.

This is even more important when it comes to symbols such as apostrophes and dashes in words. Search engines provide different results for mockingbirds and mockingbird’s – as well they should. Be sure to do your research to determine which is the most popular form of your favorite keyword.

For pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, it’s usually a good idea to target all variations of a multiple-word keyword phrase (“mockingbird songs” “mockingbird song”, “mocking bird song”). In the rare instances when we sponsor single keywords, we usually only sponsor the singular version and make sure broad matching is enabled so that the plurals and other variations are represented. But if this is a critically important keyword for you, it’s probably worth your while to go ahead and sponsor individual variations. Again, though, it’s not always a great plan to sponsor single keywords, so make sure that you track carefully to make sure the traffic you pay for is converting at a reasonable rate.

You may also be interested in our previous “Ask the Experts” answer about targeting variations of multiple-word keyphrases.

Major Video Search Engines (and How To Get Into…

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

Gravity Search Marketing’s Very Useful Video Search Submittal Chart

Ask the Experts: Do I Need Both Singular and…

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