Welcome to the Q&A Forum

The first thing to say Karl is that, sadly, every bit of software in this space currently sucks.

I've looked into this extensively, for similar reasons as you and unfortunately am yet to find a solution which doesn't irritate me in one major way.

That said, of the ones we've trialed at Distilled so far - our favourite (and my recommendation for you) is join.me https://join.me/

It's a bit fiddly as to have audio as well as video, you need participants to download the desktop app - but it's pretty lightweight, fast and less glitchy than gotomeeting.

Cheers,

Phil.

Hi ZoraS,

In short - yes, I think this site is pretty spammy and I wouldn't recommend putting in the effort to get links there. More than likely these links won't help your rankings much anyway, while at scale they could actively harm you.

Short Answer - you can do it, but it's not very strategic. It will mean that you don't hit any of your possible goals with the maximum effectiveness and ninety nine times out of 100, you won't have content suitable for both driving conversions (which should ve self hosted) and also being popular on the YouTube platform.

• You still risk the problem of potentially having your video outrank your own site if it's optimised for similar keywords
• Embedding the YouTube version on your own site helps to optimise that for YouTube and organic search - using a different embed means you're splitting the potential views across platforms.
• Some of your links will end up pointing to YouTube, rather than your own site.

The problem is ultimately trying to "do everything with one bit of content" when actually a proper video strategy should have your content types segmented into the appropriate channels.

Long answer - read the whole of this post which pretty much covers that exact question in detail. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/building-a-video-seo-strategy

Hi Charles,

Rather than diving straight in and trying to find inspiration for content, I'd actually suggest you take a step back and develop a process for determining your blog's editorial calendar in the long term.

You need to start by identifying who your audience for this content is - then look at what they care about, where the content gaps are in your niche, what USP you could potentially offer and thereby develop a real identity for your blog.

If you manage to get these ideas nailed down, the idea generation process should be easy for you. You can do keyword research to find potential topics, respond to industry news, contact a group of your audience to ask what they're specifically interested in knowing about etc etc..

I think process can often be a scary word, but the point of processes is to make you more efficient and for something like working out editorial ideas for a blog - it's absolutely the best way to ensure you're continually creating things your audience will care about.

SEO is obviously a very crowded market place in terms of blogs - this gives you both advantages and disadvantages. Advantages in that you have loads of examples of what's been successful and unsuccessful before and can therefore quickly find some potential content gaps - i.e. I think there's space for some good blogs about the intersection between UX and SEO. Your disadvantage is that it'll be tough to get your voice heard among the rest of the good blogs out there, so you really need to nail down, at least in your own mind, why anyone should read your blog - so you can create content that fits in with this mantra and therefore creates an identity for you.

Regarding YouTube content - I'd recommend using the YouTube keyword tool to work out what people are searching for and therefore see if any topics you could talk about/create a video on have search volume. If there are opportunities there, YouTube can be a great way to increase awareness around your blog.

Hope that's useful,

Phil.

Hi Bill,

I wrote the article you mentioned, so should hopefully be able to help you out!

When I wrote that post in March, I managed to get a secondary authorship rich snippet on a video result through what i could only pin down to tagging a G+ profile as the uploader element, in spite of Google saying  that the uploader profile must be on the same domain. http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=80472#1

Since the flurry of updates earlier this year, this doesn't seem to work any more and indeed, It feels like Google are settling on only providing a single rich snippet for a given result - unless there is the added "+1'd by someone in your Google+ profiles". the standard Rel=author box has also been reduced in size and if you receive multiple results from the same site, then you seemingly now only get one result with authorship mark-up and then the remaining links below.

The main reason for my original recommendation was the possibility of a second rich snippet, with tha "mini-authorship" display which Google were seemingly offering at the time in conjunction with other snippets.

Since this has now seemingly been canned, the recommendation is essentially defunct and so I therefore now Linking video:uploader to a profile on the domain such as http://www.yourdomain.com/blog/author/bill-alderson/ which I imagine will be correct if you're using WP and Yoast's plugin. However, I wouldn't expect adding the uploader element to return anything  specifically for you at the moment, given the way rich snippets currently stand.</video:uploader>

I have updated the blog post to match this advice.

Having rel=author to each page on your site wont affect the way Google read your sitemap, but it may mean that Google elect to show the non-preferential Rich snippet for your page, dependent on the search results. I have seen instances where this has happened on an ecommerce platform with a plethora of schema markup and Google then return authored results for product pages, rather than the ideal star rich snippets.

As long as you have the Page locaton Thumbnail, Title, Description, Content_loc (for .mpg, .mov, .mwv, .mp4 files) or Player_loc for .swf files then Google should have all the info they need to provide rich snippets. Anything above this is ultimately a luxury and if you're relying on automated tools to create the sitemap as you have a large bank of video content - then in honesty, I probably wouldn't worry too much about it.

I am yet to find a decent video sitemap generation tool, so am actually currently in the process of building one. The Wistia sitemap generator you mentioned should do the job just fine for you in the meanwhile.

Cheers,

Phil

You can use VideoObject schema http://schema.org/VideoObject to get rich snippets.

However - a more surefire and common place way to get those video snippets is through a video sitemap, which is how SEOmoz get their search results in the rankings.

Video sitemaps essentially provide the same kinda information as schema, but through the XML sitemap framework, rather than as mark-up in the HTML.

For more details on that, have a look here: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=80472

and then to work out how to make your own sitemap, have a look here: http://www.distilled.net/blog/video/creating-video-sitemaps-for-each-video-hosting-platform/

I hope that answers the question for you!

Hi Lesley,

I know this is what Moz does, but to be honest with you - I'm not convinced this is the best move for them. WBF's on YouTube do very little for them so far as I can tell and overall I think concentrating on one channel (either YouTube or self hosted - dependent on goals) will be more effective.

It's just like trying to have your cake and eat it. Sorry Roger!

However, the Moz example isn't really relevant here anyway, since the content is more "blogging" focused and informational, rather than being tied to a specific product.

As the videos are support related, I assume that their basically to your product/service in some way. If your product is somewhat specific (e.g. a proprietry piece of software or unique product), then you actually want to make sure your videos are hosted securely on your site - so your users come to you specifically for support, rather than going to YouTube.com or Vimeo.com. If you use YouTube or Vimeo to host, they may outrank you for your own videos and you'll find very few users actively search for product support in YouTube or vimeo search.

This means either self hosting your videos, or using a secure third party provider. My personal preference of third party video hosting is Wistia (http://www.wistia.com) but there are loads of good ones out there.

The platform itself doesn't really affect SEO juice, but you will need to ensure anyone embedding the video on a blog also links back to your site as the embeds themselves won't directly pass PageRank.

I hope that's useful!

Thanks Dana! Spot on - that's exacly what I would say :).

Essentially - no..... (unless you want to pay someone to do it for you)

but if you managed to set everything up according to Wistia's SEO guidelines, you should be fine.

I'd normally estimate it'll take 1-2 months for the snippet to show for a medium sized site with reasonable domain authority. For smaller sites, it can take longer and it can appear within a matter of weeks or days for stronger sites.

1. As you say, If you're that concerned about privacy - then you shouldn't make the video available online. It's extremely difficult/nigh-on impossible to stop those who want to pirate something from pirating it; so if you're that bothered, my advice would be don't put the video online.

That said...

RTMP S3 will likely be more secure for you than Vimeo or Wistia, because anyone who researches the way those platforms structure their URLS and unique codes will probably be able to figure out a download link and pull out the content.

2. Wistia's analytics is WAY better, plus it can integrate with GA.

3. Wistia has a ton of tools, called "Labs" and the platform is much more flexible than vimeo in terms of the functionality and embed style. A lot of third party apps will work with both platforms, but it really depends what specifically you're looking to do.

For my money, Wistia is much better than Vimeo Pro across the board, with a much better toolset - but Vimeo Pro is extremely cheap. Ultimately, if you can afford Wistia, I'd go with that.

Hi Ruben,

So - as a rule, I actually don't think a basic animated video is the best kind of video to use to explain things in a whiteboard style. Part of the success of the Moz whiteboard Friday is that it connects people on a personal level to the brand, through videos of the actual Moz staff, rather than through animation which can be a bit cold and alienating - especially for B2B content.

Additionally, Animation is extremely difficult to scale well. If you're trying to do animation with regularity, you're almost certainly going to end up creating content that is low quality - unless you have tens of thousands to spend. There are a load of services out there that will do low priced animation for you (but I won't name them because of what I'm about to say) and in my opinion, the output quality from all of them is extremely generic.

My advice would be to invest in a basic studio set-up and actually start filming videos yourself, like Moz do. It sounds daunting, I know, but it's much more scalable and will pay off in the long term. Some more advice here: http://wistia.com/learning/video-production

Here you go -

http://moz.com/blog/video-seo-post-rich-snippets

So, there are a number of factors here.

The first thing to recognise is that related and recommended videos are highly personalised. What you see will be based on things you've seen before and videos that YouTube think may be of interest to you. So, if you've watched your competitors videos before, it's highly likely that you'll see more content from that channel again, or content targeting similar topics and keywords.

That said, there are a few other factors at play. YouTube seem to generally only recommend videos within the same broad category as the video you just watched (e.g. science and technology) and click through rate on recommended videos also seems to be a big factor in determining which ones continue to be offered vs those which are offered less.

So, to optimise for that, you should look at keyword targeting for the topics you want to be seen as "related" for, and then generally optimise the performance of the video by ensuring you have good audience retention (look through your YouTube analytics to understand how your performance shapes up) and that you're getting traffic and views through embeds/referring links.

I'd recommend having a good read through http://www.distilled.net/blog/social-media/youtube/youtube-seo/ which, despite being three years old, remains fairly accurate.

Not sure if you're speaking mostly about videos watched on YouTube.com or videos embedded on another site, but with videos you embed on your own sites, you can adjust the settings in the embed so that related videos do not show up. Just unselect the button that says "Show suggested videos when the video finishes" when you go to select your embed code.

Hey Tina,

I actually wouldn't worry too much about this, for a couple of reasons. Firstly, the site isn't actually linking to you from the video pages with an

Hey,

So, the situation is relatively convoluted and there isn't an absolute right answer to what best practice will be, but hopefully I can offer you some useful advice.

I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "credit" regarding YouTube videos but I assume you mean rich snippets? In this case, it is indeed true that Google don't often give out video rich snippets for embedded YouTube videos, but instead normally just provide a video result that links to the main YouTube domain - however, within the last couple of weeks they have visibly begun to occasionally offer some more rich snippets for embedded YT videos, but only for high authority blogs and where the blog provides a great deal of supporting content.

That said, you should still summit a video sitemap for any embed YT videos you put up, as you are giving google good metadata about your site that helps them to crawl it better. While you may not get the rich snippet, that does not nullify the value of the sitemap.

I'm not quite sure whether in your proposal you plan to host the versions of the videos on your own site with a third party or with YouTube? If it's the latter and you're simply proposing that the metadata on your page focus's on different terms than the YT video itself, then I would advice against it. In this instance, you almost certainly won't get a rich snippet, as in Googles eyes the embedded video will be broadlyl irrelevant to the focus of the rest of the page. However, having versions on your site hosted with a third party i.e wistia (or self hosted) and then uploading the content to YouTube, essentially as a duplicate, but targeting a different term - this can work. Whether its a good idea or not really depends on the content itself and the audience base the site has.

Another point to recommend is that you should never put promotional or commercially focused content on YouTube - always host that yourself or with a secure third party solution. The user engagement metrics on YouTube are critical in determining whether you will rank both on YT and on Google and if the videos appear algorithmically uninteresting - then your rankings will suffer. Only put content on YouTube that users who find the videos through searching on YouTube will want to watch. How-tos and funny content are great, but stay clear of product information or blatant advertising (unless you are doing PPC YouTube advertising).

Hope that's useful, let me know if you have further questions.

Phil.

Written on my iPad, on a train, so sorry for any typos!

I'm biased because I created the strategy...

But I think we do pretty decent stuff with video at Distilled. We offer training, consulting and conferences as our products.

Our YouTube channel - http://youtube.com/distilledseo is filled with loads of informational content designed to increase our brand awareness. This content also lives on our blog

We have video all around our website designed to improve conversions and sell our identity as a business e.g. https://www.distilled.net/contact/ https://www.distilled.net/about/people/benjamin-estes/

Then we have an entire library of premium video content which you have to pay to access http://www.distilled.net/store/landing/ . This stuff is way deeper in the conversion funnel, but helps to get us bigger customers and high value contracts.

No, it's actually the other way around. Check out http://www.youtube.com/distilledseo to see what i've done with Distilled's channel.

If you go into your YouTube account settings page http://www.youtube.com/account_manage then scroll down, there is an option to "allow adverts" or "do not allow adverts". choosing the second option will prevent pop-ups and other adsThe pop-ups are essentially PPC ads and only appear for accounts which have high enough views to be offered monetization. YouTube default settings do not have pop-up ads, you have to explicitly allow them.

Hi Prateek,

It's tricky to say definitively why you've lost all your ranking without spending some time with your analytics, but i've had a quick look through your site and link profile and i have a few thoughts - which it would probably be worth looking into further.

1. Your site doesn't have enough unique content on it, which may be causing a panda slap. - while i assume all of the blog articles are unique and written by you (they are on other sites on the web, but i think these sites have duplciated your creations)  the ads, the sparse design and the non-unique images don't indicate to Google that you're a valuable authoritative resource. - i would seek to redesign the site and look lessening the prevalence of the few ads you have,
2. You have an extremely dodgy looking link profile - some of your referring sites seem incomplete and spammy, you have tons of nofollow links from unrelated sources and lot of links from extremely questionable adult sites. I wouldn't be at all surprised if you are getting a penalty for these links or Google have deindexed the sites providing you these links - lessening your domain authority. I would recommend that you seek to clean up your link profile as best you can - especially the adult links.
3. Your site is a quite slow to load. - to fix this, I would initially look at browser caching and the size of your images

Thanks,

Phil

Hey Kate,

That's an interesting Question. I think you may struggle to find someone specifically trained in the requirements you state, as Video SEO and Video optimisation is a very specific skill that only some SEOs will have experience of, and few people working in the technical video space will have even heard of.

That said, I'm sure you should be able to find someone for the role by just advertising for the core competencies required and then training a good candidate up in the specific video optimisation skills, which are fairly simple principles to learn.

I would recommend taking a two-pronged approach to hiring - searching for people in the production space with some web experience and searching for people in the marketing/SEO/web space with video production experience. While your job description has mostly "SEO" type skills, to be a good video optimiser your candidate will also need an understanding of encoding, embedding production and dramaturgy. So..I suggest posting the job here:

• Mandy
• Production Hub
• Skill Set
• Film and TV Pro

Requesting a technical editor with web experience - specifically analytics and HTML.

Then also put the job on http://jobs.inbound.org/ and any other SEO jobs boards you can find, but ask for the core SEO experiences and some video production knowledge, rather than specific YouTube optimisation skills.

Obviously YouTube experience is a bonus, but in my honest opinion, it shouldn't be a pre-requisite because of how easy it is to pick up the basics

Once you've found someone with the core skills - both creative and technical ability, then essentially get them to go through this guide - http://www.distilled.net/training/video-marketing-guide/ and all related links in depth.

However, It is a tough thing to find candidates for and I expect it is going to take you a while to locate the right person. It recently took me about 4 months to find and hire an editor & animator with HTML experience at Distilled and the challenge wasn't getting someone with the right skills, but finding someone who was talented and smart enough to be able to work things out for themselves, try new things and get to grips with the ever changing landscape of online video.

Hope that's somewhat useful.

Cheers,

Phil.