How do I optimize a video?

It’s very important to have a few different things:

1. Focus heavily on the title, and I don’t just mean from an SEO perspective. Remember that videos get watched because of how they are titled – “how they sell themselves.” Think sexy, compiling, viral titles (it would be good if it has your keywords but that’s not as essential as long as it gets a viewer’s attention and, thus, increases your chances of getting a potential watch).

2. Think about time: people are busy and don’t have 20-30 minutes to look at your video, even if it contains the most incredible content on the Web. You really want to make these videos short, punchy and exciting! As soon as your video gets boring, it will be tuned off and it’s not going to be shared.

3. Tag your videos with keywords that are reflective of the content.

4. Brand your video with your logo to generate brand awareness with your prospects. Take advantage of this by incorporating your brand in your videos.

5. If you are posting your video on a third party website, make sure you have a link in the first line of your video description that lead to your website.
6. Allow users to rate your video. Search engines will pay attention to this when ranking these videos. It’s also a crucial part of “going viral”, as potential viewers are very attracted to highly ranked videos.
7. Start thinking and planning: how is your video going to spread virally? Who can you contact to get it out there? Who will embed it or link to it? And who is going to talk about your video?

Should I use mass-posting services?

A: The best mass-posting service out there is TubeMogul. I like their services and I think it’s really strong BUT you need to be careful of what it can do!

If you chose to push your video using a third party source, be aware that these websites (YouTube, metacafe, dailymotion, spike tv and Vimeo) have a really high authority, and “can rank for just about anything.” If you put it on your website and are ranking for it, but later put it on all these other sites .. you might actually be cast aside! Most of the time, people will be embedding or linking to the YouTube version of your video rather than the one from your website, which will leave you cut out of the picture and forgotten – which is the opposite of what you are trying to accomplish!

If you are really worried about getting cretin keyword to your website and cretin keyword to the third party websites?

* Don’t use the mass-posting services like TubeMogul and do it yourself; the reason is that you can custom control your title
* Use a punchy, catchy title on the third party website that does not have your keywords in them, so they are not going to rank and take away your traffic
* User super-optimized titles on your website to draw that traffic to your hosted video

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