Now that Google incorporates video into their universal search results pages, and YouTube is the #2 search engine in the world, high-quality video is an essential component to any strategy for increasing online visibility. How can you make sure you get the most out of your YouTube uploads?

Create Content That Gets Results:

1. Create compelling content

You don’t have to be quirky and viral to create successful, high-ROI video for your business to promote on YouTube. Successful examples of video content that work for most businesses and brands include:

• Product demonstration: to show your wares in action
• Introduction to your team: to build a more personal connection
• “How to”: to highlight a product or service in action, to decrease customer support burden
• Office/factory tour: to highlight your capabilities, to bring your business to life
• “Hot topic” discussion: to show your expertise on cutting edge and controversial topics

At the moment, YouTube limits videos to 10 minutes in length for most users (some partners may get special privileges). Make sure to keep your video to this length. If you want to create longer content, make sure to divide it into coherent sections of less than 10 minutes each.

2. Record high-quality video

Use H.264 or MPEG-2 encoding. Record at an “HD” level resolution – this is 1920×1080 (1080p). Record in 16:9 aspect ratio if possible. Thumbnails are now set to show in 16×9 (prior wisdom used to be to upload in 4×3 because thumbnails showed at this ratio, this is no longer the case).

3. Highlight your brand

Don’t forget to include your company name in the video, both verbally and in writing. You can include your logo and company name as a title card at both the beginning and end of the video, or you can overlay it at the bottom or top of the video throughout. If you do not have video editing software, you can include these additions after you upload the video via YouTube’s Annotations feature.

4. Include a call-to-action

Your customer watched your video, now what? Let them know how they can contact you by highlighting your website and phone number in the video. Once again, this can be shown at the beginning and end or it can be displayed as an overlay throughout the video. Using YouTube’s Annotations feature, you can create fields in your video that display your phone number or URLs for relevant areas of your website.

Rank High:

1. Research keywords.

First, you must know which keywords you want to target. You want phrases that are relevant, descriptive, and are searched on. You can determine search traffic on keywords using Google’s Keyword Tool.

For example, more people search on “how to use chopsticks” than “using chopsticks” even though it is a longer query. Also, more people use the compound “chopsticks” than “chop sticks” with a space between the words. This knowledge helps determine which words are best used in title, description, and tags.

2. Use keywords in title, description and tags.

Make sure to keep themes tight and relevant. For instance, you would not want to target “how to use chopsticks” and “Chinese restaurants” at the same time. Instead, you might target “how to use chopsticks,” “chopsticks demonstration,” and “learn to use chopsticks.”

3. Choose the right category.

Make sure to review all the categories before choosing where your video fits. Once you have looked at all the categories, choose the most relevant one.

4. Share your video!

Don’t be shy about promoting your new video. If you use twitter, tweet about it. If you blog, blog about it. Embed the video into your site. Link to it from your email newsletter.

5. Don’t stop at YouTube

Gain incremental traffic by uploading your videos to Metacafe and Vimeo as well. Vimeo allows for significant customization of their channel pages as well as longer-format video uploads than YouTube. Videojug.com and 5min.com are also great sites for uploading instructional and how-to content.

Look Your Best:

1. Be aware of character limits on YouTube.

• Title: Keep your title to 45 characters or less to make sure it is not cut off (…) when displayed in search results.
• Description: Optimize the first 140 characters of your description to include keywords and encourage clicks. This is likely all that will be displayed within YouTube search. Include a functioning link to your website within the first 200 characters of the description. To ensure that it functions, do not remove the http:// from the URL. If the URL is longer than 27 characters, it will be truncated, so it is probably best to link to your home page. You may need to remove the “www” to save characters.

2. Make sure to select the best thumbnail possible.

The thumbnail is the image preview of your video, and the right thumbnail can make a big difference in views. In YouTube, you will be able to choose from three thumbnails, which are taken from the frames at 1/4, 1/2, and 3/4 into your video. In most cases, at least one of these thumbnails will represent your video well. However, if you find yourself having to choose between three bad choices (frames that are unclear, unrepresentative, etc.), then you can slightly modify the length of your video and re-upload. You will have new thumbnails to choose from.

Pure Visibility is getting ready to launch videos on a couple of our client’s websites as well as our own site. I have a background in film, so I have fallen into the role of “video guy” and have the task of helping clients get their videos online. Even though I am a directed and produced many independent films, creating and posting website videos is a different challenge.

Some of the questions I encountered were: How should the content differ? Where should I host the video? Where should I place it on the website? How can I measure the effectiveness? We are just getting started in the world of video and I have not answered a lot of these questions, but I am starting with what I know about online advertising by starting with identifying goals.

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Last month I attended Search Engine Strategies (SES) in Chicago and a recurring theme throughout the week was universal search/blended search and how to leverage it for your online marketing campaigns. In particular I attended 3 panel discussions on online video and in each session universal search was a hot topic. The big takeaway I got was that if you don’t have any videos online and indexed by the search engines then you are missing out on a lot of potential, qualified visitors to your site.

Universal search means the search engines show results with not only blue text links, but a blend of results from images, video, local listings, news, and text links. As you can see in the screenshot on the left, if you search for “elmo” you get image results, videos, and text links. Google, Yahoo, and MSN all have versions of the universal search results and search marketers are observing a trend of more and more people skipping over text links in favor of clicking on other rich media like video or images.

One case study that was explained in the “Video SEO” presentation was about a cosmetic dentist in Sunnyvale who sees a 16% conversion rate from people that contact him after watching his online video, compared to a 3-4% conversion rate from those who find him from a paid or organic text link. In addition this particular dentist increased his search engine visibility, when a user types “emergency cosmetic dentist sunnyvale” in Google, he owns the number 1 organic spot with his youtube video. Having the video allowed this dentist to appear 3 times above the fold because he had a paid listing, a local listing, and a video listing. This is what we mean by starting to “own page one” because he owns multiple place on the first page of search engine results which greatly increases the likelihood that potential patients will find him.

A lot of the people at SES including myself agreed that video is the wave of the future online and the fact that youtube is starting to beat Yahoo in the number of monthly searches only validates this assumption. My prediction is that in the new wave of search engine marketing you will not be able to survive only on a paid search account with text links. Companies will need to have a universal online marketing approach utilizing paid search, good search engine optimization (SEO), press releases, a social media strategy and different online media like video, images. The days of surviving on simply having good SEO and a high ranking for a few terms is over.

This evening Barack Obama is going to spend about four to five million dollars to air a thirty minute ad on three major networks nationwide. Not since Ross Perot in 1992 has a candidate spent so much money to reach so many people at the same time.

But, in fact, Barack Obama has reached the equivalent of ten times that many people over the last year, and his campaign has essentially done it for free. How? YouTube.

This wonderful post by Salon’s Cyrus Farivar ties together a number of threads about the influence YouTube had on the 2008 election cycle. Citing a number of different sources, he comes to the conclusion that the total number of hours of YouTube videos with pro-Obama political content was over fourteen MILLION HOURS.

To put that another way, Obama got the equivalent of fourteen hours of viewing time for entire city of Denver through YouTube.

McCain was a distant second, with only about half a million hours of viewing. This massive deficit is striking for two reasons. First, it means that Obama supporters are posting a lot more videos. Secondly, and more importantly, a lot more people are watching them. If engagement is a measure of a brand, Obama’s brand is solidly in the lead on YouTube.

How much would this exposure be worth in terms of television? Well, using media buyer price points, Micah Sifry calculated that the value of the advertising would be around $46,893,000.

Taking one more step back, even though Obama’s campaign is currently taking in jaw-dropping amounts of campaign contributions, that is more than the campaign received in eight of the last twelve months. To put it another way, Obama’s presence on YouTube was worth a month’s worth of fundraising.

These kind of social media multipliers are the kind of thing that internet marketing is supposed to promise, and Obama’s campaign has found a way to make it deliver. So, even though tonight’s message will potentially be seen by nearly a hundred million Americans, you can be sure that far more will end up watching it on YouTube–at not a penny of additional cost for Barack Obama’s campaign.