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by Harry Moore

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One of the questions I had to answer after I came back from NY was how to make google searches find our video assets. I had to sit through a few hours of seminars to come to a final answer on this one. With the current spiders as they are there is no perfect answer. There are ways around this fact, your pages will come up, but currently with the main deliverables of video, flash or straight video formats (WMV, MP4, iTunes download) thtere is no good way to make your videos to show up in searches really. So how can you get around this?

Content Content Content. I am a web dev and this solution sux for us. When creating a video page you need to have something on the page, not just video files, that the spider can grab onto. So the real solution is not how to get spiders to see the video, they will not right now, but you can make the page with the video files on it a very sought after page with content that will attract the spider and watchers will follow.

Best scenario is if you have a video section area on your site and you come to a splash page with a listing of all the videos and have no further break down of your videos, then you set up a page that spiders will not see. Keeping the videos in flash will guarantee this; what you need is content, and not vague one size fits all content, specific content for each video. From your main page you should have maybe one video playing in a flash movie in the middle of the page and at the bottom of the page image representing other video files and short descriptions of each. Clicking one of these images take you to a unique page with unique content and terms specific to that particular video. Having a pure dynamic area for this is no good, as spiders are not there to click and activate code that will populate these sub pages. This gets into horizontal searching, where people may come in through the back door and then circulate back into your main content.

Taking a line from Senator Craig, if you keep a wide stance and a good base for your content that is legitimate for your brand you will drive more traffic to your main content and more dollars to your pocket. Videos are a great asset if positioned correctly if not they are drags on server traffic and resources and thats where the real test is, bang for your buck; traffic for your resources. Draw them in with nice videos and push them back into your site with interesting content to make those conversions.

Learn more about this author, Harry Moore.

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