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Online video proliferation has marketers stumped: blinkx unveils guidelines

The recent explosion of online video has marketers asking questions on how to maximize exposure to their videos. That is precisely why video search engine blinkx has produced a set of guidelines to help advertisers, marketers and content owners understand how search engines rank rich media content.

Broadband has flourished and driven the demand for rich media on the Internet. As a result, advertisers and content producers are forced to move from a text-based world to video content.

“With the proliferation of video on the Web, people are starting to think about optimizing the ways in which their videos are found in much the same way we’ve been applying search engine optimization strategies to text based content,” said Suranga Chandratillake, founder and chief technology officer at blinkx, San Francisco.

Over the course of working with users, blinkx learned a lot about video search engine optimization and saw a real need for tools and best practices advice for both amateur and professional video creators.

The SEO tips, which are in white paper form, cover where to put video content, how to distribute it and what additional services one may need to know.

“We’ve also started a wiki, which will be a live resource for people to learn from, share experiences and connect with one another around video SEO,” he said.

The SEO tips offer practical and technical tips like cleaning and conversion of metadata; optimizing titles, description and filenames; leveraging site maps; utilizing media RSS; content management, where to submit; and what to avoid.

Blinkx will not monetize from the white paper or the wiki.

The guidelines can be viewed at www.seowiki.blinkx.com.

“Traditional SEO has been a massive market, and there is now enough video on the Web that people are really starting to care about how it gets found,” Mr. Chandratillake said. “We saw a need in the market for resources for content creators, and we think that by offering this white paper and building the wiki we are offering a more structured assistance program.”

There are several new video search sites bubbling up, and a few very popular video-sharing sites such as YouTube and Google Video.

Blinkx is different because it indexes content from all over the Web, including content on sites such as YouTube, Google video, the BBC and MTV, for example, and make it fully searchable.

When users click through the results, they’re taken to the appropriate site. Blinkx claims it currently has the largest index on the Web, with more than 7 million hours of content.

“Blinkx has built a reputation as the smartest way to search new forms of online content, such as video and podcasts,” Mr. Chandratillake said. “We use advanced speech recognition technology that automatically indexes and transcribes audio and video content, to deliver results that are more accurate and reliable than standard metadata-based keyword searches. We also use some basic visual analysis to improve results.”

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