by Brian S. Foley
Video marketing for business websites can be a strong way to get visitors to your site, as well as get backlinks that help your ranking in the search engines.
Some web designers and web developers also make videos for business websites. But generally they over-do the production (and costs) and under-do the marketing (and value) of the video, if they do any marketing of it at all.
Placing a video on your own website is not even scratching the surface of video marketing. There is so much more to it. A competent internet marketer should be able to help you with this much more than an advanced web-designer.
The things that laymen or web-designers may consider intuitive are sometimes dead wrong as far as getting good search engine page rank. Consider the use of Flash movies - they look impressive, so you might think they are good for your site.
I recently learned something quite interesting about video games. Many young people have developed incredible hand, eye, and brain coordination in playing these games. The air force believes these kids will be our outstanding pilots should they fly our jets.
—Ronald Reagan (b. 1911)
But they load very slowly because their file-size is enormous, and google penalizes your site for slow loading speed.
Also, search engines don't read most of the information in a Flash file, so all the work and money that went into that flash movie is lost on Google and other search engines. You could have had a few sentences of text that would load in an instant and would count for much more in search engine results pages (SERPS).
One of the legitimate uses of videos is to create a video marketing campaign. What that means is that you launch videos on social video websites like YouTube to attract visitors to your business website. When people watch the video on YouTube and like the content and want to know more, they are sent to your website by either a link in the movie, or information within the movie that sends them to your website.
You can have something exactly like that with your own videos, and it doesn't cost you any bandwidth on your own server because the videos are hosted on sites like YouTube. But you need someone who really knows what they are doing with this stuff or you'll be throwing time and effort out the window.
In other words, video marketing doesn't require a "show-off" video on your own business website promoting yourself. It would be better to have an information packed video that may go viral on a video social networking site to build credibility for your business and send visitors to your website.
We attempt to remember our collective American childhood, the way it was, but what we often remember is a combination of real past, pieces reshaped by bitterness and love, and, of course, the video past—the portrayals of family life on such television programs as “Leave it to Beaver” and “Father Knows Best” and all the rest.
—Richard Louv (20th century)
Besides the possibility such movies sending visitors to your site, there is the (possibly more important) benefit of the backlinks your site gets from the social media site it's hosted on. The more videos you make, the more backlinks you have. And backlinks are great ways to get your site pushed up higher in the search engine rankings.
Of course, you can't just throw movies up on random sites. You have to have a marketing strategy for them, and you have to have done your keyword research and many other things that contribute to the success of your video marketing campaign.
Please realize that most web designers have no clue about what you have just read. That's why you need an experienced internet marketer to help you with this. If you are interested in getting good information about your business website, contact Upstate Business Websites. Upstate Business Websites is an Oneonta NY web design and internet marketing firm that specializes in small business websites for local businesses who want to put their best foot forward on the web.