Not sure how to draw people to watch the videos on your website? Here’s our “right now” primer on video search!

There are two broad categories of video search: video sharing sites and video search engines. Generally speaking, video sharing sites allow content owners to upload videos, while video search engines index the videos from the Web, but do not host video content. Some video sites (such as YouTube) display search results only from within their own database, while others (such as Yahoo! Video Search) return results from both their hosted videos and outside websites. Many video search engines send out crawlers to index media content on the web, just like the “regular” search engines do for text content.

Video strategies can be boiled down into two approaches:

• uploading video for viewing on video sharing sites
• optimizing your video for crawling by video search engines, so that targeted traffic will visit your site to view your video content 

Why would you choose one strategy over another? It’s about what you want to gain from your video content. If you care mostly about branding or “buzz”, you probably won’t mind uploading your video for the YouTube masses to see. But if you care more about people viewing ads on your website, it won’t benefit you to have your video viewed outside your site, and you’ll want your videos to be spidered and listed by a video search engine like Blinkx.

Can you trust the video search engine spiders to find your content? We don’t think so, at least not yet. The good news is, many video search engines also accept RSS feeds from website owners.

Here’s a list of video search sites that you may want to explore for your own website: 

Gravity Search Marketing's Very Useful Video Search Submittal Chart

Name	Spider or Upload?	Accepts RSS Feed?
YouTube	Upload	No
Blinkx	Spider	Yes (submit MRSS)
Google Video	Both	No (submit a video sitemap)
Yahoo!	Both	Yes (submit MRSS)
AOL Video	Both	Yes (via Truveo)
Microsoft Windows Live Video Search (Beta)	Spider	Yes (via Truveo)
Altavista	Spider	No (Possibly powered by Yahoo! Video)
Purevideo	Both	Yes
Searchforvideo	Both	Yes
Brightcove	Upload	No
Gofish.com	Upload	No
Vimeo.com	Upload	No
Dabble.com	Spider	No, but can be added manually (login req'd)
Clipblast	Spider	Yes (submit MRSS)
Joost	Neither (Content partnerships only)	No

In our SEO book, we are very clear about the difference between the “right now” of SEO and the “eternal,” or more long-lasting, elements of SEO. Video search definitely belongs in the “right now” category. Video search engines are being bought, sold, launched, and shut down at a dizzying pace. Contact us if you have an updated link for this chart – we’d love to keep it current for our readers!

You might also be interested in learning about video search from the following sources:

• Robin Good’s Video Search Mini Guide
• Danny Sullivan’s excellent analysis and history of Video Search on Search Engine Land

If you love the Wild West, video search should be a blast for you. Good luck and Enjoy!

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last updated 9.18.2007

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