I just read a very well-written video search tips list from Steve at GoogleWatch. Some of my favorites from his list for SEO and video:
2 Viral videos can help transfer traffic to your Web site indirectly.
The teaser strategy: Upload vids to YouTube, AOL Video etc and make sure to provide links to your sites in the video description.3 All-in-one flash video players cause problems for search engines.
Even in a Web 2.0 world, combining HTML and Flash works best. Video pages on YouTube and PBS Frontline rank well because of all the contextual information in the page.6 Put video pages off the root of your site
And don’t forget to repeat the word video or videos in your H1 tags and in the URLs.7 List your videos in your site map
Don’t forget to put keywords in the titles.8 Optimize anchor text in your links
Use primary and secondary keywords.9 Tag files and individual scenes in videos if you can
Video players like click.tv let you add text and tags to segments of a video, and that text can be indexed.11 Clean up your metadata
Some video creation tools publish too much bad metadata with your videos. Tools like Autodesk Cleaner, Sorensen Squeeze, an CastFire can help. (FYI, I’m not personally recommending these; I’ve never used them.)
Video is one of the things that most SEOs fear and this list is a nice checklist to remember. I will add that video for video’s sake is ridiculous. Most of the viral offerings are absolute junk. If you don’t have video that is either hilarious or shocking, or for some other reason noteworthy, don’t just upload crap hoping web viewers will somehow find something of value there.
However, if you’ve got a great video, optimize it (don’t forget a video RSS feed) and let it go. Just brand it well and ride it for all it’s worth!
Optimizing video is still brand new to drive traffic to your site and the rules are still being written. Video can be used in a variety of ways beyond driving traffic back to your site though.
Agreed. Branding is one of my favs, and it doesn’t even have to result in a trip back to the site.
even though a site might be no.1 in a search it doesn’t mean that they have the best service… for example if you search for “internet tv” there are many ‘list’ type sites that have very basic services (like wwitv.com… bad) but some of the best internet tv sites now have social features and are much better designed like viewmy.tv.