If you are concentrating your efforts on marketing with video, one major part of the strategy is ‘ranking’ the video high in the search engine results. If videos show up in the search results, they are more likely to get clicked than the listings that are just plain text.

Below we’ll discuss the methods that will ensure your videos will get top search rankings.

Tip one is to submit your video to as many sharing sites as you can.. Most people only submit to youtube. gain the advantage by multiplying your video onto different sites. This of course can be done manually, or simply use a video submission service like video upload pro, senuke or tubemogul.

The idea is that the more sites your video appears on, the more likely it is that one of them will appear in the search results.

Videos need to be optimized in order to appear in the search results for certain search terms. The best way to do it is to optimize for the same keyword on every site you submitted to. Or, optimize each video submission for a different keyword phrase (even though it is the same video). if any of them get good rankings, then you know which keyword phrase it is best to optimize for.

These are the things you need to concentrate on to optimize for specific keyword phrases:

– The video title
– The content of the description
— The video file name

Currently, search engines do not rank videos determined by the actual video content (although this is something they are working on). it is all down to the description, tags and title name. Think of the video the same way as optimizing an article. the keyword phrase should be included in the title, and the descripion, in a conversational way.

The filename itself is not usually displayed (unless you forget to fill out the title details). however, the filename is shown in the source html, so it could certainly impact the search engines.

The best phrases to try to rank your videos for are those that have less than 50k competition. for best results, the competing pages should be under 20,000,.

After finding the best keyword phrases, submitting and optimizing your video, the next thing you need to do to ensure a good search engine ranking is to build backlinks to the video page. You do not have much control over the page your video appears on in the video sharing site, so once you’ve optimized as much as you can, backlinks become the next most important piece in the puzzle.

The backlinks are the same types you would use for any site you wanted to gain rankings for:

— Article submission (links in the resource box)
— Social sites and bookmarking
— Commercial linking networks (paid links)
— Blog commenting

Another trick that most video marketers don’t know about is that embedding a video in different sites that are optimized for similar keywords will also increase the ranking in the search engines, as well as gaining more views to the video.

The extra views and added comments will boost the video in the video sites own results. This can be an amazing thing in itself. the latest statistics for youtube indicate that over 2 billion searches are being made each day.

The more activity there is on your video, the higher it will rank in the search results.

90% of ‘video marketers’ neglect this. they just make a video, submit it to youtube, and hope for the best. Submit to multiple sites, optimize your video page, and build some backlinks. doing this will put you way ahead of everyone else.

Once you have done the keyword research , checked out the competition, you’re ready to start creating videos optimized for each keyword phrase. Surely they are going to easily rank, in Google — right?

Unfortunately, not for sure. Expecting these kind of results will only lead to frustration. There needs to be one extra step in the keyword research phase. You need to KNOW that it’s possible to rank an optimized video for one particular keyword phrase, before you start putting in the effort of creating the video.

How to tell?

In order to tell if it’s going to be possible to rank your video for a particular phrase, you need to check manually. Copy and paste one of your researched keyword phrases into Google. Any video listings in the search results? If there aren’t, you should forget trying to rank a video for that phrase, it may never happen.

For example. At the time of writing this article, there were no videos for the phrase: “tea tree oil uses”. Even though there were hundreds of videos listed in Google (check by using the “Videos” tab), Google chose not to rank any of them in the first page of the search results.

Now, from this point, you could either dismiss this phrase and try another from your list, or “play around” with the phrase a little. Add or take away words to the keyword phrase to see if any videos appear.

Understanding why Google ranks some videos, but not others…

Try to understand things from Google’s viewpoint. They only want to display a video in the search results if it is going to be useful to the searcher. To continue the above example, after adding the word “directions” to the phrase, (so it would be: “tea tree oil uses directions”) videos appeared in the search results.

If the competition was a little easier, it would be a good idea to go ahead and make a video, and optimize it for that phrase.

Optimizing for your keyword phrase

Continuing this, sometimes the videos themselves give a hint on other keyword phrases that could possibly be ranked for.

After typing in “tea tree oil uses directions”, videos appeared at the bottom of the page in Google. The title of the videos that appeared was “Soap Making Instructions – Tea Tree Oil Soap”, so they were not much related to the phrase I typed in.

Going a step further, I pasted in “tea tree oil soap instructions”. Much better – videos were ranking at position number 2 instead of the bottom of the page. This would be the best keyword phrase to now optimize the video for.

If you are concentrating on gaining search engine traffic from video marketing, using the above technique will be a very useful factor in determining whether it would be worthwhile in creating a video.

It may add an extra step to your keyword research, but the initial efforts will pay off in the long run, and avoid frustration..

If you want to increase traffic to your video, you’ll need to try and get your video to the top of the search engines. Although, you don’t need your video in the top position to ensure that it stands out from the pack and gets high clickthrough rates. If you want your video to dominate the search results, there are three things you need to do.

1. Make Sure You Have the Right Keywords

To begin with, targeting the right keywords will ensure success. Choose unique keyword phrases that have a healthy search volume, but not too much competition. A good thing to look for is that there are already videos ranked for the chosen keyword phrase, as sometimes, big search engines like Google do not include videos in the search results, no matter how well optimized the videos are. Having this information will ensure that you will know how much work needs doing to ensure your video out ranks the competition. Videos that come up in your keyword search results will need to be analyzed to determine just what you will be competing against.

– Analyze the title and description of the video to see what keywords it uses.

– How many views and comments the video has received?

– Use a backlink analysis to determine the number of backlinks the video has, from which sites, and the page rank of the sites.

If you use tools like Backlink Watch or SEO Quake plugin for Firefox you can make tracking backlinks a simple exercise. Don’t be discouraged if you find the videos you analyze prove to be difficult to compete with, just try the next keyword on your list.

2. A Note on Backlinking

In order to make certain that your videos rise to the top of the search engines, you’ll need to make sure that you have backlinks pointing to your video; preferably with keyword-dense anchor text.

Don’t hesitate to use your article marketing skills, social bookmarking techniques, blog comments and networks as well as any backlink services you can think of to get those backlinks.

A good thing about building backlinks to videos is the fact that you don’t need to space them out too much. You can add as many links as you want very quickly. Search engines won’t notice full scale link building efforts, considering the massive amount of backlinks already pointing to the site. Following  this advice will enable you to use the type of submission services like Unique Article Wizard, that create large amounts of links in a very brief time period.

3. Syndication and RSS Submission Explained

Nearly every video sharing site generates automatic RSS feeds for each user or video page. You can submit the video feeds generated by using software along the lines of RSS Submit or RSSBot, or you can manually submit them. Two things are working in your favor if you do this.

Firstly, by doing this, each aggregator will generate links that will point back to your video and increase your backlink numbers. The second advantage is that your feed could very possibly be picked up by site creators that use targeted feeds to generate their content. More backlinks to your videos will be generated by doing this.

You can bring your video to the top of the search results by using your keyword phrases; a task that may take some time and effort, but is really quite simple. Your extra efforts will be rewarded when you see how much traffic is generated because of it.