I just finished reading the  June/July 2009 issue of Streaming Media Magazine.  Contributing writer Nico McLane wrote an excellent in-depth article titled, “In Search of Video SEO that Works”.     Like me,  McLane is frustrated with the hassles and inconsistencies of Video SEO or VSEO as he calls it.   He recommends using Yahoo! Video, YouTube or Hulu.com for a straightforward video search rather than relying on major search engines.   Although, he does note that the major search engines are working to integrate online video into their native search results working with native technology and third-party aggregators.

All of this comes on the heels of  PermissionTV’s video marketing survey posted recently to eMarketer.com.  The survey queried 400 senior marketing and media executives with some very interesting results.  For example:

• 67% identified online video as a primary focus of their 2009 digital marketing campaigns and budgets.
• 50% of the respondents are planning the launch of an online video project by the second quarter of 2009.

The survey also found that the foremost value of online video was as follows:

• Brand awareness (71%)
• Lead generation (47%)
• Customer retention (44%)
• Customer conversion (41%)

In addition, 33% of respondents expected that their 2009 digital marketing efforts will be least affected by cuts to budgets,  much less so than traditional marketing (24%), trade shows (21%), and guerrilla marketing (14%) efforts.
Obviously, interactive video is a high priority for marketers this year.

Any marketer, big or small, producing any type of video content needs to have a VSEO strategy as part of their overall marketing mix.    The article goes on to recommend some VSEO best practices:

• Use either social sites or search engines to promote your video, or  create your own portal—or you may be better off doing both.
• The best practice for YouTube VSEO is to use channel pages to take advantage of the searchability of YouTube content, as the site’s pages get better positioning because of its size. This is also true for MySpace, Facebook, and other large community sites that allow video to be uploaded to their pages, have a vast collection of pages, and are viral.
• Host your own video and syndicate that content to get the best metrics.
• Use Google Analytics with any open source CMS, including WordPress, Drupal, or Joomla, all of which offer free plug-ins to upload video and track usage.

The article concludes with some basic steps every marketer should take for VSEO:

• Choose where to promote your video.
• Narrow down your audience by demographic.
• Select your keywords.
• Define the naming schema for best search performance.
• Include RSS feeds with relevant metadata.
• Produce amazing video content (or syndicate it from other sources such as Truveo or blinkx).

You can read the full article here.