Internet Marketing - Matt Bailey [217]
After five years, YouTube’s success is astonishing. Take a look at its stats:
More than 2 billion views a day
The third most visited website
24 hours of video uploaded every minute
Simply put, if you want to reach people, YouTube could be a good place to consider.
YouTube is owned by Google, and you may have seen that videos are also shown in Google search results periodically. Many times, the videos tend to be more relevant than other results and get more clicks. For some searches, multiple videos may be shown, even before the other search results. Providing video content is easier than ever, and the ability of videos to get prime placement in Google’s search results can provide a significant source of traffic to your website.
Although there are other video-sharing sites, such as Vimeo, Viddler, and Daily Motion, the basics of uploading and optimizing the video are the same. Optimize your video with a keyword-specific title and description, and be sure to complete all the text fields describing the video. Use keywords to explain the title of the video, the description, and the tags. Search engines will read the content in the text fields and use that for relevance. YouTube (Google) has also developed technology that will automatically create captions based on the words in the video.
When creating a page, be sure to provide a link back to your website in your profile. When necessary, link the relevant page on your website from the particular video. The default settings won’t allow you to do this in YouTube; your channel type must be changed from “YouTuber” to one of the other options. In doing this, you will be able to add a direct link to a web page in the video description box (Figure 18-3). In this example, the title of the video, the description, and the tags all use keywords of the subject and location in the important text areas. The hyperlink in the description (under the video window) allows viewers to go to the page where they can get more information.
Figure 18-3: The display of the title of the video, the description, and the tags in YouTube
Photo Sharing
Sharing sites Flickr, PhotoBucket, Shutterfly, SmugMug, WebShots, and Picasa all allow visitors to create an account and upload photos to share with their friends and the online public. There is also some overlap, because the photo-sharing sites are starting to offer video. However, people tend to think of them as pictures first, rather than strong contenders in the video space. Users can create albums and provide descriptions of the locations and the types of cameras, lenses, or filters used to capture the photograph. Although certainly not limited to professional or semiprofessional photographers, users of all types are welcome and able to upload photos from their collection to share with others.
If you are older than 30, chances are you have boxes of photographs stored away in a closet or basement. The older you are, the more you have stored away, all with the intention of organizing “some day.” The problem that people have when organizing these photographs is the inability to organize them in a logical format, because this is the limitation of the hard-copy format. The same picture could be put in the honeymoon pile, the beach or vacation pile, or maybe even the relatives pile. If more than one person is helping organize these photos, then there will be even more methods of organization and disagreement over which pile the photo will be placed in.
This is the beauty of digital photo sharing. You can upload a photo and classify it with multiple tags. This way, the photo will show up in any collection where the tag is selected. A photo is relevant to many aspects of our life, so limiting one photo to one display category makes little sense. By offering unlimited categories for a photo, it can be appreciated and seen more, based on the whim of the browser.