Expand Your Web 2.0 Advertising with a Searchable Online Hotel Video

Why do you need to make your online hotel video searchable? Can’t we just use the same old videos that we have been using for ages? In the world of Web 2.0, having a video is no longer useful unless it is created with search engine optimization in mind. Online videos are considered the third most effective online advertising media by US advertising executives today.

Why Make Your Video Searchable?
It is important to understand why you should make your video searchable. Simple reason - there are tens of millions of clips and videos created daily on the latest news, advertisement, seminars, conferences, events and many other reasons. It is crucial today to make sure that there is an easy way to search for these videos. Video search has become more complicated today than ever before. In our opinion, there are three main reasons why video search is gaining market share:

1. It is free! No Cost Per Click/Action: Unlike PPC/ Paid Search, currently there is no cost per click charge for video views on Video Search Engines. This makes online searchable videos a phenomenal free source of advertising.
2. Social Media Tagging, Customer Reviews - Many Video Search engines allow the ability to tag your video, post reviews on their sites or email it to a friend. This functionality opens up new low cost advertising media for search marketers.
3. Universal Search – Recently Google and other search engines launched a feature called universal search. Universal search shows mixed search results from online advertising media such as Video, Mobile, Local, and several others. Now video search results are showing up in major search engines under regular results. This helps in optimizing (dominating) search engine results effectively by adding video search in to your marketing mix.

Difference between Standard Video and Search Engine Optimized Video
The Online video developed for search engines is vastly different from the standard videos that you can get from companies specializing in video creation. Videos created by these companies (including online videos) are standard video files but are not optimized for the search engines. It’s the same parallel as a search engine friendly website versus a website that is set up as a brochure. A search engine friendly website can be found for different key words from the search engines; however, to view a brochure type of website, you have to know the website address to find that site. The search engine optimized video and standard videos differ from each other in the same way. A search optimized video can be found by users typing in things relevant to your market on the main search engines and in video search engines; to find your standard videos, the consumer needs to know the website address for the site where that video is posted. This makes the effectiveness of the two types of videos vastly different.

Process of Developing and Promoting Searchable Video
The process for developing online videos is very similar to developing a search engine friendly website. It is important to do keyword research and develop content to promote your business with appropriate keywords. The video should be optimized for web-delivery and encoded with keywords and metatags. The video is then embedded in HTML code on the website for search engine optimization and then promoted in top video search engines. Once the video is promoted, you can use tracking software to see how many reviews are posted on the sites, how many people watched the video etc.

Milestone Online Video Offering
Milestone has seen tremendous success on search engines with our online video strategy. Interested to see an example? Click here to check out the video for Grand Velas Resort and Spa. Please contact your Milestone rep for more information.

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