Online video is probably the most powerful marketing tool you will ever use online.

Perhaps many of you already know that having a video on a website produces better conversion rates; but how many of you know, or even thought about the SEO benefits of having a video?

Web video is a disruptive technology that is changing the SEO game; Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion. Is it safe to say that your algorithms have been changed/improved for web video? Of course it is.

It has been proven that one can get a good Google ranking overnight using web videos; this requires the right skill set and up-to-date knowledge; Google now rates video higher than large articles, videos that have good titles, descriptions, and relevant keywords (metadata) used for the video name (ie, instead of using 77034_jp.mp4, use hotelname-kings-lynn -norfolk-east-anglia.mp4 ) – are more likely to appear within SERPS (search engine result pages).

With blended search results (a mix of text, images, news, video, and local results) slowly becoming the norm, this is now changing eye tracking patterns (how people’s eyes scan SERPS). . To put this in a nutshell; people are more attracted to video links that are presented in other blue text results; We humans have always been drawn to images as they include color and obviously stand out more on a page full of text. And now consider that once that image is clicked, you are presented with a video; It doesn’t take much imagination to figure out what is most likely to be clicked within the SERPS (Search Engine Result Pages).

Video can give businesses of any size greater exposure and communication capabilities: there’s an advantage to having videos hosted on YouTube and the like; in that these sites have a preset Page Rank and Authority to begin with. Videos hosted on these sites can often be optimized for first page ranking simply by optimizing the video title. Universal search results are skewed towards YouTube videos, so first page rankings are achieved quite easily.

Online video ultimately exists to increase revenue by driving traffic to the site owner’s product/service pages; Choosing the right package (ie shooting and editing) is critical to delivering successful video content; the detail is in the attention paid to lighting, framing and sharp editing, which is not only nice to look at; The bottom line is that your company’s message to your target audience depends on this attention to “quality” detail.

In today’s tough economy, maintaining and improving online conversion rates and brand image is paramount to the survival of any business, and as we can all agree, this requires strong commitment and desire – one needs to see clearly a Return on Investment (ROI).

There are service providers that include uploading of video files, with a fancy Flash video player uploaded and embedded into client websites. These services can also provide an opportunity for customers to have a YouTube channel set up for their business (all inclusive).

Provide an increased and immediate link popularity opportunity to your customers; this meets the objectives of “off-page criteria”, which are used by search engines to determine quality content; “Off-page criteria” add the aspect of fairness to search engine rankings. The important thing is not the quantity of incoming links, but the quality of those incoming links. An inbound link from YouTube will carry more weight than an inbound link from a smaller, less popular website.

Now this also provides an additional opportunity in relation to link baiting: any content or feature within a site that encourages viewers to place links from other websites; through embedded links provided by most video hosts, such as the YouTube Share feature built into your player; an extremely powerful form of viral marketing, as it encourages the sharing of videos. Video links from customers can easily end up being advertised on social networking sites, blogs, and content sites.