SMX West - Video, Images & Blended Results - Amplify Overview

Published by Christian | Filed under Events

I had the opportunity to go to the Search Marketing Expo (SMX West) in Santa Clara, California last week. Here are some notes I jotted down during the session: Video, Images & Blended Results. For further reading, I’ve found other resources covering this topic here.

SMX West: Search 3.0: Video, Images & Blended Results

Speakers:
Benu Aggarwal, CEO, Milestone Internet Marketing
Eric Enge, President, Stone Temple
Todd Friesen, Director of SEO, Range Online
Henry Hall, Microsoft
Deepali Tamhane, Yahoo!

Todd presented first. What is Universal Search? “Google did not create Universal Search - Ask.com pioneered it.” Easier to find for celebrity / pop culture stuff. Subtractive Blending - 10 blue links on the page; dropping web results out for blended ones. NOW it’s Additive Blending - now there are 13+ blue links on the page.

Eric was up next. Talking about image search specifically. comcore numbers say that +7% of all searches take place in image search engines. Other industry figures have suggested about 15%. Image tracking studies show that it changes drastically when images are present in the blended results page. Value proposition for a visual health site - the images themselves! Good image search results = good web search results (i.e. much of normal on-site SEO improves image SEO, specifically URLs).

www.google.comsafesearch_help.html - go here to appeal to have your pictures not be filtered by SafeSearch

Make sure to alt-tag images. Use the word “picture” or “image in our alt attribute.

Benu was next up. “Cover all of the bases” and do it all (to have a chance at ranking for anything in the blended results). 3 out of 5 users in the US watch online videos every day. Six things to do to optimize your video:

1) Keyword research
2) Video production
3) Optimize for web delivery; encode the video
4) Surround video w/ HTML
5) Create Media RSS (XML) & create video sitemap
6) Video Submission - track your video reviews

Video has zero CPC. If you can’t produce video, produce a sort of “flash” image slideshow and submit it as a video. That works! Create accounts on Flickr for each client. Tag all of your photos. Alt-tag it as well. Include a link to your site in the description. Brand your video by adding a watermark & call to action.

QnA time! Some good questions including is submitting the same video with same name and such to different video outlets a duplicate content problem? Survey said essentially no. My question was answered: “Would creating a video of just images make it so the users that clicked on it feel like they were ‘cheated’? Have you seen any negative backlash personally from this practice?”  Benu answered with something along the lines of if they’re high quality images then no.