In the 3rd installment of my Video SEO series I will quickly go over some best practices for titling your web videos.

These tips refer to the title of your post or page that contains the video as well as the title that is included in your video’s metadata. As well as your video title on video sharing sites like YouTube.

• 1. Utilize your strongest keywords within the title, but keep it short and relevant. Anything over 15 words is probably too many, around 10 is better.
• 2. Begin title with ‘Video:’ or ‘Video of…’ This will help identify the content and attract readers to the fact the post is a little ’special.’
• 3. Identify a specific topic(s) covered within the video. For example if it’s an interview with an expert on web design, instead of saying “My Interview with Web Designer Jack Armstrong” you might say “Video: Web Designer Jack Armstrong Talks CSS, Layouts, and Browser Considerations.”

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Part 2 of my Video SEO series (Part 1 is here) deals with what video file format you should use and how to create it for publishing. So while some of this information pertains to  search engine optimization for your video, a solid chunk of it is really a how-to for publishing your web videos online.

Flash (.flv) has overwhelmingly become the posting format of choice for web publishers. All major video distribution sites (like YouTube) transcode whatever format you upload into Flash for publishing. There are three main reasons why Flash has become so popular:

1. Compatibility: The majority of internet users have the Adobe Flash player pre-installed in their browsers regardless if they are on a PC or Mac. Quicktime (.mov) files on the other hand may be difficult for some PC users to view, while Windows Media Player files (.wmv) may be difficult for Mac users.

2. Quality & Size: The Flash compression codec is able to ’squish’ the video file into a small file size while still maintaining a quality picture. How small and how good of quality will depend on your compression settings but generally speaking you will be able to find a compression ‘recipe’ that fulfills your needs. I’ll talk more about compressing Flash files for the web in a minute.

3. Player options: Using Flash gives you a lot of options as far as the look and functionality of the player you want to publish your video in. If you are using a video sharing site like YouTube or Vimeo you are stuck with the basic layout of the player but most have some color, and size customization options. If you are hosting the video yourself, there are even more skins and player options available. In addition to changing color and size, you can add a watermark or logo, add social media features and turn the embed code on or off. A couple of popular player options are FlowPlayer and JW FLV Player.

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Lately search engines, like Google, have been becoming more video friendly. However unless you properly optimize your video content, it can be a challenge for search engine ’spiders’ to find them.

At first the complete video SEO (Search Engine Optimization) strategy may seem a bit overwhelming and time consuming. But you will find that most of the steps quickly become second nature and the increased traffic to your videos is well worth the work.

I’ve decided to break the ‘SEO Tips’ into bite size posts that I will release over the next few weeks. This way you can digest them one at a time and implement them organically into your workflow.

Naming Your Video Files:

This is a very often overlooked tactic; properly naming of your files is important as it is one of the first things search engines spiders look at to identify what it is.

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