Video is beginning to find its footing on the search engine rankings. As the search engines strive to return ever more relevant results, more and more videos are making it to the top.
Nate Elliott of Forrester Research found that videos are 53 times more likely to appear on the first page of search results than text pages. Online video views, especially from concentrated video sites such as YouTube, have exploded in popularity surpassing online searches.
The unique ability of videos to “go viral” and attract large audiences makes them extremely attractive to search engines which rely on turning up good search results in order to keep their customers. The key to optimizing video is to include key words in the titles, tags and file names. Videos hosted on YouTube also get much more love from Google in its search rankings.
In a recent survey of more than 400 executives 67% said online video would be a primary focus of their 2009 online marketing.