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Pop Quiz: What is the 3rd biggest search engine?

Yahoo, Bing, AOL, MSN, ASK?

None of the above. It’s YouTube.

This is not surprising especially considering the largest search engine owns it – Google. This now means that as you use more video content on your website, you have to learn the best ways to optimize and distribute it. Hubspot provide an excellent guide to optimizing your videos, which will save me time as I want to tell you about your alternatives and why it’s worth choosing different platforms for different reasons.

If YouTube is the biggest and best why should I bother with the rest?

Here are some of your options:

• Wellcomemat – Real Estate specific. I am a fan but don’t like their search functionality. Maybe they will read this and change it! Union Street Media has a channel and some of our clients, which have had a big impact on search engine visibility and user engagement.
• Vimeo – High quality host that offers a good array of viewing widgets for your site especially with Macs. Serves the creative community well with shorts and artistic videos in HD. The free basic option only allows 1 upload a week though and most importantly NO COMMERCIAL CONTENT.
• Tubemogul – TubeMogul is a free service that provides a single point for deploying uploads to the top video sharing sites, and powerful analytics on who, what, and how videos are being viewed. It can distribute your video to all of these: Youtube, Yahoo, Myspace, AOL, MetaCafe, Google, Rewer, DailyMotion, Blip, Veoh, Crackle, Sclipo, Viddler and HowCast.
• Viddler – Very user friendly with a good variety of formats you can upload with, customize and distribute including social media APIs. I especially like the option to be able to use your own branded watermark instead of the platform as you see from YouTube or Vimeo. This of course is with the pay version. Drat!

Google’s new Universal Search is randomly placing thumbnails next to video search results, attracting the eye FIRST, even before the #1 search result. This new style of blended search results is the kicker for video. Whatever happens next, it’s clear that video SEO is finally starting to catch up to the rest of the web. With services like SpeakerText and YouTube captions emerging to help eliminate unsearchable content issues, the future likely holds more automated and accurate video-text mapping and perhaps eventually video editing with the use of cloud computing. There’s a thought.

Search Results for Union Street Media: A good example of Universal Search, where it’s not just about web site results anymore.