Best practices for producing and distributing video on the Web

Say there is a company that has produced a great how-to-video on making widgets. The next thing they need to think about is how they are going to publish or distribute this video on the web. When posting videos online there are a couple of things to consider. First what is the goal of posting it? Is it to start a viral marketing campaign about a social issue or is it to provide a service on the company's website to draw more people in? And secondly, what kind of web server does the company have and how knowledgeable is the webmaster? The answers to those questions can help the company decide whether to host the video on their on server or post your video to a sharing site such as YouTube.

Benefits and concerns of a company hosting its own videos:

Hosting your own video can draw more visitors to your site, enable you to customize how everything on the page looks, and one can choose to sell ads or not. There are a few things that need to be in place before this is a viable option. First, you have to know how to work with the video files if you are going to host your own videos. The webmaster will have to encode the video into a different format to incorporate it into the website. For example a lot of videos are edited using mpeg or avi but to put them on the web in an easily usable form they need to be in Flash (by Adobe) or Quicktime (by Apple). Most web videos are streamed using Flash. The second thing to consider is can I afford the bandwidth? Video files are large and require a lot of bandwidth to host.

Search Engine Optimizations tips:

Limit each page to one video, allow the URL to be specific to a video, place all videos in a central folder/directory, use an embedded player in the page instead of a popup, use text on the page to describe the video, use tags and meta tags to help search engines, submit the video to Google sitemaps to help speed up the indexing of the video for search, and allow users to share the video with friends by providing the url or providing social networking links.

Benefits and concerns of a company posting videos:

Unlike a hosted solution that requires video conversion, the posted solution takes care of converting the video files, and they pay for the bandwidth. Also, most of these sites, like YouTube, MetaCafe, or GoogleVideo, have a good reputation and a large user base that is constantly watching videos and sharing the videos with friends. This is a great solution for any type of viral marketing campaign. Popular YouTube videos are tied into universal search (incorporated into Google "web search", people don't have to be specifically searching for videos to be shown videos on that topic ) in Google which is a great way to publicize a video. Going with a posted solution however, you lose the full customization over the look of the page and whether ads are shown. In most video sharing sites, ads are displayed. Some ads maybe images or text but some maybe videos that play before your video is shown. In some cases this could be an ad for a competitor.

Search Engine Optimization tips:

Post your website URL in the description of the video, create your own account/channel/brand to allow people to follow all of your videos and any future updates, use your url in a watermark in the video because these might be copied and posted elsewhere (it is viral), allow comments and ratings to generate user excitement and discussion, and use tubemogul.com to upload the video to all major sharing sites and see analytics on those videos. TubeMogul looks like a very powerful tool for businesses or individuals to track videos all over the web.



Information from ReelSEO