It seems to be clear lately that videos posted on your site can boost page ranking. I was brainstorming and came up with a goofy idea, and would like some feedback from some experts on whether or not this would work.
I had an idea for a "viral" comedy video--you know, the funny, TV commercial kind that the cubicle dwellers love getting and spreading around to all their friends?
What if I created this video, and somehow hosted it on a back page of my real estate web site? I know that most of these types of videos that get forwarded all around are sent as .wmv files. Is there some way to secretly "tag" a .wmv that is forwarded so my site is linked.
I suppose that I could just post it to my YouTube real estate site, which will have all my info on there, and then start e-mailing links back to the video, which would be hosted there...
I had the idea for the video BEFORE the idea to use it to help ranking...

Am I way off on this, or is it "crazy enough that is just might work..."?

Any other ideas on video in general would be appreciated, too.

The only thing you could really do if you wanted to put a link to your site in a wmv would be to just edit the meta information of the video. Depending on whatever video editing software you use, it should give you the option of adding Author information and the like.

Another (probably more reliable) alternative would be to either 1.) make a 2-3 second intro that says something like "brought to you buy www.yoursite.com", or 2.) put the URL to your site in an unobtrusive area in your video and keep it there throughout the video.

Aside from that, I really think making a Flash-based version of your video would be the best way to go. Flash gives you a lot more options to do exactly what you want. Heck, you could even make it so when the video ends, it automatically redirects the visitor to your site, but that requires some coding experience.

Personally, if you want to do a wmv, I would recommend option 1 and just make a quick "brought to you by" graphic at the beginning of your video. Otherwise, I would recommend FLV/SWF.

Another way you could do this would be to use tubemogul to upload the video to a dozen different accounts (such as AOL, yahoo, youtube, viddler, etc).

Many of them will give a hyperlink back to your site if you include your URL as the very first part of the description. Although you won't get tons of direct links, if it truly does go viral, lots of folks will link to youtube, viddler, etc and since you have a link from them to you, some of that Pagerank will pass through to you.

Don,
The impression that I get is that you have to be really lucky in order for a video to go viral. It sounds like it's more of a fluke if it happens. If you can do it, well that's great. But if the purpose is simply back links, it might be best to put your effort into something that will do that in a more predictable fashion.

Sometimes I think it's easy to get carried away with the idea that we want a lot of backlinks. What really is the point of backlinks? It is to help our site rank better in the search engines right? But what's the point of ranking high in the search engines? It's to get traffic isn't it. And whats the point of getting traffic? Of course it's to make sales isn't it.

So if it's not really backlinks that are our ultimate goal, but traffic that leads to sales that we want, then an entertaining video even if you can get it to go viral may not be helping you to your goal of traffic that converts to sales.

Now if you think you are creative enough to make a video that could go viral I'm not trying to discourage you. For me the only way that I'd likely come up with something that could go viral would be if the cat attacked my head while filming, or if someone drove through my front window.

So I'm looking for more predictability. Plus I don't want to clean up the mess, or have stitches in my head.

So if the goal is to both create traffic and backlinks at the same time we can use a blog, we can use articles, and we can use video too.

I think a blog is a no brainer, and then you can rewrite some of your best blog posts as articles and submit them to article directories. I've mention elsewhere that I use ArticleMarketer.com to distibute articles with. They submit your article to 3700 article directories. Of course all of the directories don't pick up your article, but for example I submited an article 4 days ago and a google search shows it on 47 different sites already. To try to submit it myself to that many sites would take forever. I have a series of 10 more articles (previously written blog post that I've reformatted) set to go out over the next 20 days, this will create tons of links, while at the same time creating traffic. Article marketer is a pay service, $89 for three months for an unlimited number of articles.

But back to video. I have only done a handful of videos so far. The first thing I discovered was how easy they are to make. I thought it would be a big deal to make a video and get it on the web, but the first one I did was made with my $150 cannon picture camera! The quality was the average that you find on the web. It only took an hour or so to edit the video, and minutes to upload it. Wow, that was easy.

Joel mentioned TubeMogul.com which I have used. It is a free site, and once you've set things up, which takes an hour or so, you can submit any video to about 10-12 sites in a couple of minutes. Your videos will also get picked up by a few other sites. The videos will give you some traffic by themselves, will give you backlinks, and they will show up on google search pages. These videos can help you dominate search pages.

But I've just come across something that looks very exciting. You've just got to check this out! Go to TrafficGeyser.com and watch the video. It shows what their system is set up to do, and it is phenominal. Then enter your email in the box and you will be sent a link to some free videos. Make sure you watch the 10 x 10 x 4 video. Don, your head will probably start spinning with ideas and possibilities. I know mine did.

Traffic Geyser is not a free site, it costs either $47 or $97 a month depending on what package. But you can cancel at any time, so no commitment. My plan is to make about 10-15 videos in the next two weeks, then sign up for this service and give it a try. For the cost of one month ($47) I will find out how well this works. If it works well, I'll keep cranking out videos.

Basically they submit to about 70 sites, but each of these sites are submited to 4 times with different titles. So one video would be submitted 280 times. 10 would be submited 2800 times - now that's a lot of backlinks, and a lot of opportunities to creat traffic.

But do check the 10 x 10 x 4 video out, there system is set up to create far more benefit than that. You'll just have to check it out.

Anyway, there is no doubt I'm going to give this a try.

If you check out the vidoes, let me know what you think.

Chris

I have been listening to some SEO podcasts, etc. and it got me to thinking on this post: if I did host a popular video on some page of my Real Estate site, and it did go somewhat viral, would Googles bots disregard some of the linkage because of the "relevant" factor? (The video would be "funny" and unrelated to Real estate). The podcasts that I was listening to seemed to keep harping on the point of having "relevant links"...maybe I am a bit fuzzy on that concept.

@Don: The short answer to your question is it depends.

If all the backlinks from your viral video had the exact same anchor text in all of them, then some of them would be disregarded (kind of like the whole idea of Google and "duplicate content"). On the other hand, if the anchor text from your viral video was different on many of the pages that are using your video, then the chance of backlink penalty's are far smaller.

Google would not disregard the links because of "relevance". They would all be scrutinized and have an impact on your website's ranking.

The importance of having "relevant links" can refer to the links that are leaving your website too. These can be just important as the ones coming to your website. Aside from the "bad neighborhood" issues, the content on your website and the theme of the sites that you link to can dilute the real estate theme of your site.

If you have A LOT of content on your website that is NOT related to what you are really trying to rank for - real estate keywords - and you have links leaving your site to other sites about that same non real estate content - that reduces the value of your site as a real estate resource and ranking can be affected accordingly. (Any content that would be helpful to buyers or sellers is fine - having movie reviews for example is non-real-estate content)

Having many links coming to your site using keywords related to that non real estate content will help you rank for those keywords but can have the reverse effect for your attempts to rank for the real estate keywords.

That would be what the podcast are referring to when they talk about the importance of relevant links.

I just checking this out and looks like a great service. let us know how it turns out!

Greg, I will let you know how it goes. This week I'll be making a bunch of videos - about 20. This will be a tough project to get done in a week, but we'll see how it goes. So anyway it may be 2-3 weeks before I have any thing meaningful to report. But I'll keep everyone updated.

Chris

I was just at a SEM event in Portland called SearchFest. One of the speakers said that TrafficGeyser is the way to go. Better results than Tubemogul in his opinion.

Greg, What other interesting things did you learn at the SEM event? Was it worth going to? What was the one best thing you got from it?


As I mentioned above TubeMogul is free and distrubutes to 10-12 sites. TrafficGeyser cost from $47 a month to $97 a month but distributes to 70 - 80 sites and has lots of other good features. (Links to these sites are in my post above for those who haven't seen it.)

Chris

I've used trafficgeyser and tubemogul and I've found tubemogul to work best for me. Probably 99% of traffic comes in through the sites that tubemogul posts to anyways. Plus, trafficgeyer is expensive.