YouTube

The video, and indeed Neil Ciciereg’s whole Potter Puppet Pals series, is a relatively simple idea. Using puppet stand-ins for characters in the Harry Potter series, the video has the characters creating a boppy little tune a capella, to the rhythm of a mysterious ticking noise. For such an uncomplicated premise, it is amazingly catchy.

It’s also amazingly successful. Steadily in the top 20 of YouTube’s most viewed list, and the winner of the Comedy section of the YouTube Awards in 2008, the video has caught the attention of even the movie series’ stars.

The source of this success is what site owners can learn from. The video, and the series, came from real love of the series. This, combined with a new approach, was all it took to turn a basic idea into any search engine optimisation guru’s wet dream.

A lot of business videos fail because they’re made from the wrong motives. Certainly, any video posted as part of your SEO plan is going to have a business motive, but the central spark has to come from genuine enthusiasm. Otherwise the only mysterious ticking noise you’ll hear is your YouTube campaign about to bomb.

SEO

YouTube

It may surprise you to know that YouTube is the second largest search engine in the UK, behind Google, and it receives more searches than both Yahoo and Bing. While yes, the vast majority of videos on YouTube consist of people falling over, babies laughing or cats being thrust into wheelie bins, the $1.65 billion website (because that’s what Google paid for it) also contains TV shows, adverts, promotional films, music videos and even entire feature films. YouTube is on course to replace television as the entertainment medium of a generation, and TV advertising revenues have fallen below those of Internet advertising for the first time ever in the UK in 2009.

In addition to all of this; due to the obscene figure that Google paid for YouTube, the search giant is keen to promote it and use wherever possible, and this means ranking videos within its natural search results. Whether you intend to search for videos or not the chances are, if you’ve used Google to find anything remotely interesting, you’ll have seen videos from YouTube crop up in the search results.

How does YouTube help with SEO?

What does all of this mean? It means that YouTube isn’t just for watching videos of cats being thrust into wheelie bins; YouTube is about promoting services, promoting websites, increasing brand recognition and boosting SEO. The best bit is, through SEO, you can actually help your YouTube videos to be ranked by Google. In doing so, you can ensure that your videos rank in Google’s index for keywords, giving your brand even more presence in the search giant’s index.

With this in mind, one of the services we provide at StuckOn is videos for YouTube. Using a combination of SEO and video production, we produce videos for our clients that showcase their services and help their rankings on the first page of Google. Our in-house team handles this, a highly trained bunch as you can see by the photographs, headed up by BA Hons Film and Video graduate Darren Jamieson, who studied at Newport Film School under Allan Niblo (producer Human Traffic, The Football Factory) and alongside Phil Claydon (director Lesbian Vampire Killers).

SEO Videos from StuckOn

One video that we produced for ourselves recently was this effort about SEO, in the style of a 1950’s public service announcement.

Our video explains how SEO techniques, employed by our team of ‘boffins’, can help June’s website to rank high ‘on the Google and whatnot’. Notice how Tarquin’s pipe moves in tune to his fingers as he works on June’s on-page SEO – this is an essential part of the search engine optimisation process!

Once the film was shot, it was edited digitally using Adobe Premier. The voiceover was recorded and added separately, and then all that was left was to age the video to take it back 60 years.

The aged film grain, complete with scratches on the film and hairs in the gate, was created by exporting the finished video from Adobe Premier and importing it into Windows Movie Maker – which has a series of filters to achieve such an effect. This made our youthful cast look like rejects from the 1950s; complete with pale skin and sepia tones.

The finished video, as you can see, looks like a 1950’s public service announcement about SEO – something that didn’t exist until 1997.

While this video from funnyordie.com of Eva Mendes announcing the official release of her sex tape may be a very funny joke, it also plays a serious role in SEO and shows how search results can be manipulated to your own ends.

In the video, Eva explains how her new product, sticky tape called ‘Eva Mendes Sex Tape’ already had a market within Google as so many people were searching for it, therefore releasing the product seemed like a good idea. Naturally, the product isn’t real and Eva Mendes hasn’t gone into the world of DIY materials, but the success of the video online, both from an SEO perspective and as a viral, show how important monitoring search results can be.

The makers of the video realised that it would be successful as a viral video because people were already searching for it, and once it was released they knew it would be found, linked to and would spread across the Internet very quickly.

The same tricks can be used within your own industry to find out what people are searching for, and you can create posts, pages or even videos offering the results they’re already seeking. This would increase your exposure online and ensure more traffic for your business.

YouTube

In March this year YouTube, after failing to reach any agreement over how music artists would be compensated for views of their music videos on YouTube, acted to block access to many music videos to UK audiences.

Now however Google and YouTube have reached an agreement with PRS (the songwriters’ group) to compensate artists for views of their videos. Details of exactly how much is to be paid by Google for each view have not been revealed, but the good news is that UK users of YouTube can now view videos of all music performers from Lady GaGa to the late Michael Jackson, to local group the Ting Tings from Salford, Manchester. SEO for videos on YouTube is of great importance to websites looking to gain that extra edge, so this agreement between Google and PRS is good for websites who use music videos and YouTube in their search marketing.

As part of the agreement, Google is paying royalties for music videos until 2012, and the payments are being backdated to the beginning of this year.

Adam Shaw, part of the PRS for Music stated how pleased he was about the agreement:

We have 60,000 song-writer and composer members and many of them don’t earn very much money at all – 90% of them earn less than £5,000 a year.

The money we receive is really their living.

According to YouTube, there were tens of thousands of videos removed which will all become available again over the coming week.

Patrick Walker, from Google owned YouTube, added:

The music videos are an extremely popular part of YouTube and this deal doesn’t only cover the music videos but also music included in TV programmes like the X Factor and also for the inclusion of music in user videos as well.

Despite all of this, YouTube is still struggling to turn a profit; something that Google will need to address sooner rather than later.

YouTube

Yahoo paid a cool $160 million for Maven Networks last year, and now that money seems to be wasted as Yahoo is winding down the company.

This strange retreat from Yahoo is just a month after the battle cry from Carol Bartz, the Yahoo chief executive, that Yahoo would be moving into video technology in a big way by acquiring more businesses.

Despite the move to close down Maven Networks, Yahoo is putting a brave face on it by declaring they’re still dedicated to video technology, they’re just scaling back investment in some areas.

Maven had some very big clients for video content, including CBS Sports, but Yahoo will be winding down the contracts. There will also be redundancies as Maven employees are laid off to save costs.

Yahoo has also closed two other video sites this year, Y!Live and Jumpcut.

The message to Google seems to be, help yourself, the battlefield is yours.

Whatever your opinion on Wikipedia, whether you believe it to be a useless website filled with half truths and lies, or whether you consider it to be a useful resource online, contributed to by intelligent and informative individuals, you can’t argue with Wikipedia’s undoubted SEO value. The website has billions of pages and ranks at the top of Google for pretty much every conceivable search, making it a thorn in the side of some SEOs and a powerful ally for others (depending on whether you can use Wikipedia for your own benefit or not).

Now Wikipedia is going down the route of video and looks to potentially challenge Google’s YouTube, at least for education, fact based videos.

According to the latest news, Wikipedia will be featuring videos (user submitted and edited) on its pages towards the end of the summer. The use of video on Wikipedia is being backed by Mozilla (who make the web browser Firefox) and comes just months after Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, ditched his attempt at beating Google in the search engine game when ‘Wikia Search’ died a death.

Wikipedia has partnered with three sources for videos, the Internet Archive, the Wikimedia Commons and Metavid. Between them they have almost 5 million videos.

Did we just hear YouTube draw breath?

YouTube

However, it seems that we may be wrong with our first impressions for according to a new report YouTube isn’t costing Google quite as much as we might believe.

While a report released in April by Credit Suisse claimed that YouTube could be costing half a billion dollars per year due to the bandwidth used by the videos and the failure by Google to effectively monetise the website, another report contradicts the findings.

A second report by RampRate, from San Francisco, say that Google has managed to reduce overheads at Google with superior infrastructure, which has led to losses from the video sharing website to be significantly lower than first believed.

Furthermore, because of the sheer volume of bandwidth required by YouTube, and of course the buying power of Google, its costs for bandwidth would be greatly reduced because of the bulk ordered. Also, nearly 75% of the bandwidth required by YouTube comes with no cost because the peering arrangements that Google has created.

RampRate believes Google has lost just $174 million this year, compared with the $470 million that Credit Suisse claimed.

But what is the best way of hosting your videos online? Video files can be very large, so hosting them on your own website uses up your server space, uses up your bandwidth when people watch it, and that can slow your website down.

No, the best way to host your videos online is by using the Google owned YouTube, as everyone from home video fans to major Hollywood studios use YouTube to showcase their videos.

Some reasons YouTube is the best way to host videos are:

• The hosting is free, you don’t have to pay a penny for it
• The videos can be embedded directly onto your website
• The videos can be in high definition if you want them to be
• YouTube videos can have comments, meaning people can give you feedback

Of course none of these reasons really touch on the most important reason for using YouTube for your videos, and that’s because YouTube already has millions of users, users that can find your website through your videos.

By hosting the videos yourself you’re relying on people finding your website in order to watch them. By using YouTube your videos will show up in YouTube searches, and in Google searches, for the relevant phrases. YouTube videos also show up in Google News now too. This means that potentially hundreds of thousands more people will see your video than they would if it were hosted on your server. Then by optimising the video title and description, and the links within the description, you can ensure your video is seen by more people, who then see your website.

YouTube isn’t just a free video hosting platform, it’s a TV channel with millions of viewers where you can run your videos and adverts for free. Make use of it!