Is YouTube the best choice for marketing my business on line?

Is YouTube a good fit for marketing my business?

-Melanie Peters, Melanie Peters Productions

You’ve spent time and money on your online video campaign, and now it’s time to send that piece of cinematic marketing genius out into the great big world.  When you launched your web site it was optimized, and so you must do with your online videos.  But where and how is the best way to gain momentum in the search engines? Here is a quick run down on VSEO (Video Search Engine Optimization), and the need for a dual strategy from Posting to Hosting your online videos.

We’ve heard that YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world, so it’s obvious you must post your videos on it to gain maximum exposure. But there is a very strong difference between posting and hosting.  To best optimize your video so it can be found, it needs to be hosted on a site where you can customize the video sitemap and introduce it to the Internet. When you host on a site like Oculu, for example, you are able to harness the power of detailed analytics on who and when, and for how long, your videos were viewed, and, with their custom sitemap generation, you can also send out a automated video site map introduction to the internet, so your video channel on Oculu is recognized by the major search engines.

A great example of this in action is Innovate Media hosting a video advertising Video Spokesperson Production. They loaded up the site map with the key phrase, Video Spokesperson, and it remains the only Google blended result with the video thumbnail on the first page.  Powerful.

Hosting your videos then on Youtube, will result in driving traffic and SEO results, back to YouTube, not to your own site.  Though you can keyword the back end of your YouTube videos, it does not have the individual Google result capability of a customized video site map.  Here’s where the dual strategy comes in, You need to “post” a copy of that video on YouTube and let it be the great search engine in itself that it is, then “host” the same video on your own web page with a site like Oculu.  It’s also super easy to Host that video there, and then distribute it with one simple step to every major Social Media network, including YouTube, with a click of a button.

There are many more reasons to shy away from YouTube as a hosting service, such as Fortune 500 companies blocking the site inside company firewalls, and since the majority of online videos are viewed during business hours, this means a nice pretty black box with a question mark where your video should be.  Not to mention the overwhelming amount of advertising one is subjected to from the site.

Take advantage of the power of video marketing, and learn the dual strategy of Posting vs. Hosting, and watch your search results soar.