Today there are many ways that potential and current customers may view feedback of your products and services.  It starts with some of the more popular internet social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Yelp.  But it also extends to the thousands of other lesser known sites that support reviews, feedback and blogging.

As a company functioning today, your brand and reputation can fall victim to anyone with an internet connection and a feeling they’ve been wronged in some way (justified or not).  In order to address any negative or inaccurate feedback that might get published (we use this term loosely) on the internet, you must monitor cyberspace for these types of comments.  Fortunately, there are tools available to do this monitoring.

Here are some of the many tools companies are using to keep tabs on competitors and scan for online customer comments.  Many of the inexpensive (including free) applications are robust enough for most small businesses.

• Google Alerts: Sends an e-mail when a specific word or phrase is used online.  Cost: Free
• Yext Rep: Tracks mentions and reviews of your business on websites such as Twitter, Facebook, Yelp, Foursquare, and SuperPages.  Cost: Free
• Viralheat: Offers geo-location features that monitor online conversations by region.  Cost: $10 to $90 a month
• Trackur:  Reports how often keywords appear in articles and blogs.  Cost: Free to monitor one keyword; $18 to $377 a month for multiple keyword searches.
• Visible Technologies: Supports 12 languages and lets multiple employees share reports.  Cost: $500 a month and up.
• Radian6:  Lets users manage social media campaigns.  It integrates with Salesforce.com, Omniture, and Webtrends.  Cost: $600 a month and up.

So say you do find someone saying something negative about your company and/or brand.  Then what?  There’s a great article on Mashable about how to respond and contains some high profile real world examples.  The bottom line is to keep your ear to the ground (hopefully with one of the tools mentioned above) and act quickly when action is warranted.

One area that is often overlooked with SEO is the optimization of video content.  While creating video content is extremely popular these days, it is typically not mentioned as a way to bolster your company’s search rank.  According to a recent Forrester Research study, videos are 53 times more likely to generate a first-page ranking than traditional SEO techniques.  Why so much more?  Well, with the advent of  “universal search”, the inclusion of desperate types of results (search results that combine traditional text, news items, images, twitter feeds, and now videos search matches) are now found in search results for several popular search engines.  Universal search implementations typically showcase video content on their first page of search results, and more often than not are showcased above the fold (the point in the page which you can see without scrolling).  This means that video content that does get selected, is by default awarded a high ranking on the first page.

It can be quite difficult to rank in the top 10 for many common search terms.  It is however far easier to rank at the top with video content.  This is mainly for two reasons: 1) relatively speaking there is a lot less video content on the Internet than traditional textual documents, and 2) the video content that is on the net is generally very poorly organized, tagged, and referenced.  So the search engines have a hard time identifying and associating the right content with the right search term.  Typically, content that is difficult to identify and classify ranks lower in search engine results.  The key to SEO is honestly representing your content in the clearest manner for the search engines, so that they may realize the remarkableness of your specific content.

So, there’s a huge opportunity here to drive inbound traffic, leads, and ultimately business through your website by executing a basic video content strategy that utilizes some simple SEO rules of thumb.  We’ve created a step-by-step guide that provides you with 6 ways to get your video SEO strategy off to a terrific start and begin driving serious traffic to your site!

1.  Choose the Right Host

You have 2 choices for content hosting, either host the video yourself or host the content on one or more third-party sites, e.g., YouTube.   Each option has its benefits.  You need to decide which better fits your goals.

Option 1: Hosting on Your Own Website

Choosing this option will draw people into your website and increase the volume of your own site’s search referrals.  You can accomplish this by embedding your video content into a page on your site.  This can be done either as part of your website or your on blog.

It’s somewhat off topic here, but another SEO technique to remember is to host your blog as part of your domain name, i.e., either as blog.yourcompany.com or www.yourcompany.com/blog.  Don’t waste your time having your blog hosted somewhere like wordpress.com or another blogging site unless you can have your domain as the address for the blog.  The reason for this is that you will be losing all the SEO benefits of having users link to your “remarkable” content (see “Inbound Marketing” for more details) giving all the page rank to the blogging site instead of your site.

Use Video Sitemaps

If you choose to host the video content on your website, it is critical to make sure that the search engines know to index the pages that contain the videos as well as the information about the videos themselves.  This is accomplished by creating what’s called a video sitemap.  In general, a sitemap is a document that tells search engines about pages on your site so they have a better chance of being indexed (i.e., discovered and known by a search engine).  You should already have a general sitemap for you website in order to SEO your textual content.

A video sitemap is a type of sitemap used to specifically identify and tag videos on your site.  A good video sitemap will include the video file, a thumbnail image, and title and description information (see tip #2 for details on title and description).  If your site does not have a video sitemap, the search engines will be unable to include your video directly in related search results (though they could still index the page on which the video lives.)

Option 2: Third-party Hosting

This will maximize the total video views because it has the biggest built in traffic (no matter how good you are marketing, I’m willing to bet there’s a lot more people going to YouTube than to your website).  If you decide to go this route, here’s a list of the Top 10 video sharing sites from Mashable.

Consider Mass-Upload Services

If you decide to use third-party sites to host your content, I would recommend using more than one site.  The trouble with this is that each hosting site has their own ways of submitting content to them.  Guess what?  There are services that automate the process of submitting video to all major and even some minor video sharing sites in one batch.  These services are fairly simple to use, so if you are just going for the most views, using this type of service is definitely the way to go.  However, if you are looking to rank for the keywords related to the video, and you give up this content to the major video sites, most likely their pages will rank higher than your pages on search engine sites like Google, since their sites mostly likely already have far more site authority (the higher the site authority, the more value search engines like Google give to a site) than your site has.  If your goal is to improve your site’s ranking by driving links and traffic to the page on your site, you may want to use this type of service sparingly or not at all.

2.  Use a Great Title and Description

Just as one of the most important things to do for each web page is picking a good title and description for good SEO, the same should be done for each video that you distribute.  You want to be verbose, include your most important keywords, but do it in a way that is user friendly and does not appear as though its just a listing keywords.  This takes some practice and several drafts to get it right.  If this is new to you, I suggest starting with an outline that contains the terms you want to use and then build sentences and then paragraphs around these terms.  Also remember to put the most important terms earlier in the title and descriptions.  The earlier the terms appear the more weight they carry to the search engines.

3.  Transcribe Your Video Content

Since search engine companies cannot process a video and understand its content from just the bits that make up the video, associating a text transcript with your video is a great way to let search engines and related sites (e.g., YouTube) get a better understanding of your videos.  You can achieve this a couple of ways.  Whichever method you choose, associating transcripts with your video is a key step in unlocking the content otherwise stuck inside your great video content.

Option 1: Manual Transcribing

The cheapest method is to manually type up a transcript and upload it to a video service along with your video.  The only downside to this option is the time it will take to type out all your video content.  If you have a lot of content, you might want to consider the option, using a transcription service.

Option 2: Use a Transcription Service

There are a number of companies that will transcribe your content for you.  Obviously this will cost you some money, but has the benefit of not taking more than a few minutes to submit the video content to the transcription service and then putting the content online once the service has been completed.

4.  Optimize Your Content Addresses

This tip might be somewhat obvious for those familiar with traditional SEO as it is a typical recommendation for every page on your website.  The idea is to optimize your site’s directory paths (URIs) by including in them information about what’s on the page itself (i.e., www.mycompany.com/left-handed-wrenches.html is much more descriptive than www.mycompany.com/product12343.html).  The same logic should always be applied to the page that contains your video:  www.mycompany.com/video/mushroom-chicken-recipe.html is a better URI than www.mycompany.com/mushroom-chicken-recipe.html and a much better URI than www.mycompany.com/recipe3431.html.

5.  Short and Sweet

No matter how good you think your video content is, you must remember most people are very busy and have a short attention span.  You should not expect anyone to watch a video that runs longer than 10 minutes.  Even 10 minutes is really a long time for some one who’s on the web. Try staying in the 2-5 minute range if possible.  If you have 30 minutes of content that you cannot cut down, then split it up and make it into a series of smaller videos.  This has the benefit of keeping the user’s attention and it also allows you to multiply the number of videos that you can optimize, tag, drive traffic to, and rank on Google for.  Think about it, if someone comes across your content and wants to link to it.  What’s better, one link to your 30 minute remarkable content, or 6 links to the same content (1 link to each of the 6 videos each part being 5 minutes long)?  The 6 links obviously!  For absolutely no extra work, you can increase your link count by a factor of 6 in this case.  External references to your site is one of the main ways to greatly increase your ranking for search engines like Google.

6.  Get Out the Word

Finally, once you have the video content tagged, submitted, and uploaded, it’s time to let the world know about it!  Videos can attract a large number of inbound links, which is what we’re after here.  Inbound links have a disproportionate effect on boosting your SEO rankings and bumping you up on search results.  So it’s time to spread the word, post a link to your video, and make it easy for users to share your video on their Facebook, Twitter, YouTube accounts, and personal blogs.  You can help spread your video content to other sites by adding a media widget right next to where you locate the video content.  Also, make sure you encourage your network of contacts (employees, collegues, friends, and family) to help get the word out too.

The Bottom Line

The bottom line is that online video content is a great way to educate your customers, expand your reach, drive traffic to your site, and increase sales.  With some unique remarkable content and a basic understanding of how to handle the SEO for that content, you can tap into this exciting and dynamic opportunity today!