For as long as I can remember people have been telling me that YouTube is the no 2 search engine; for almost as long I used to say, so what? – people serious about buying stuff or researching what to buy use Google – people search at YouTube to be entertained.

For a long time I had a suspicion that this wasnt quite true but its only when your own behaviour changes that you really convince yourself. So ‘acer pruning’, ‘sipp providers uk’, ‘exporting email addresses’ and ‘conservatory suppliers uk’ are all YouTube searches that have recently provided me with a richer experience than just searching at Google – even in the latter case where no results were found the sponsored results were useful.

So I think its now official – people search at YouTube for everything – to find suppliers, to look at products, to see how products work, to see how to repair or assemble products and so on. Some companies are now uploading literally hundreds of clips per day to drive traffic. Here’s an example of how one of our customers uses YouTube (www.heskins.com) – they provide industrial non slip tape and their videos show how to apply it….

You’ll see they are number one in the search list (out of 65) – I’ll explain Video SEO in more detail below.

Its also so easy to take video nowadays through the use of ‘Flip cameras’ and the ubiquitous IPhone and its lookalikes. Taking professional video is not an essential, or even the best option in many cases, with ‘amateur’ clips quite often having more credibility.

So, if we add clips to YouTube whats the best way to optimise them to ensure we get top visibility like Heskins? – Here’s a list of some Essential Video Optimisation Guidelines for you.

Of course YouTube is not the only show in town – there are other video upload sites, here’s a list of the top 10….

So it makes sense to submit to all of them, and there’s an inexpensive tool which allows you to do this to all of them at once, Tubemogul. In fact if you search at YouTube you’ll see how you can use this tool; here’s one useful clip Tubemogul in Action

So what we have been talking about so far is visibility when people search at YouTube, or at the other video upload sites. What’s also desireable to have our clips appear in the search results when people search at Google, for example…

So, courtesy of Google Universal Search we now have the possibility of getting visibility in this way too. In this case Google has decided to include clips from video hosting sites (YouTube and Dailymotion) – it may have just as easily decided to bring in clips from videos hosted at you own website or blog. Here’s some Optimisation Guidelines to help you with this.

Incidentally, you may find it easier to get visibility in this way through sites like dailymotion and the other non YouTube sites.

So, switch on that camera and start snapping and posting to increase your online visibility – video is only going to get more popular.