Five pages of images representing trending topics have been made available in each case, and it’s possible to either click through the pages one by one or let them scroll automatically.  Then, by hovering over an individual image, a user can see what site it came from.  Current top sources include the Washington Post, Yahoo News, the New York Daily News, YouTube, Yahoo Video, and Metacafe.

It seems like this approach is bound to get Yahoo a lot of additional clicks and attention.  After all, it’s one thing to know that tensions between North South Korea are running high, but a picture of three warships – or of Megan Fox or Michael Jordan, depending on one’s interests – is more likely to draw an individual in.

Early results have been quite positive, too.  A post on the Yahoo Search Blog explained this morning, "Already, we’ve seen double-digit percentage increases in engagement for both image and video search since launching these new homepages, with a 60% increase in time spent on the image search homepage."

And more "pretty" updates should be on the way.  The post continued, "This is just the start of a set of changes we’ll be making to help you find the information you’re looking for."

WebProNews fired a few questions at Benjamin Wayne, CEO of Fliqz, a Video hosting firm to see if he had some good tips to offer our readers. The following is the product of our Q&A.

Do you have tips for online video promotion? Share them here.

WebProNews: Have you noticed any difference in possible ranking factors for videos among Google, Yahoo, and Bing as far as blended search results go?

Benjamin Wayne: Google tends to be the site that drives the biggest portion of SEO traffic, and they seem to currently ignore all video-level meta-data with the exception of title. Matching the title tag to the video title also appears to have beneficial effects for search ranking. Yahoo tends to dislike video submission from non-partner third parties, and often rejects feeds without providing specifics as to why. Bing seems the most sophisticated in terms of information it considers, but also employs human editors to curate results that appear within Bing Video results.

WPN: Other than the obvious YouTube, which video sites are the most important to have a presence in?

BW: This really depends on the goal, which typically bifurcates into either driving branding by piggy-backing on the audience of a third-party site like YouTube, or driving traffic through submitting videos in such a way that they appear in blended search results and drive traffic back to the publisher. In the former scenario, YouTube really has the lion’s share of online video audience, and for most video producers, is the only site they need to care about. If driving traffic is the goal – and for most publishers, this should be their primary agenda – Google’s blended search results account for an overwhelming majority of search traffic. Beyond Google, Bing and AOL are both good targets.

WPN: How important are YouTube’s new enhanced caption features for video SEO?

BW: They’re not currently a factor in how Google ranks results. If this changes, they may become more important.

WPN: How would you convince a skeptical business about the benefits of online video?

BW: As marketers, we typically care about two things: driving traffic, and converting visitors. On the former, it’s hard to ignore the extraordinary efficacy of video from an SEO perspective. According to Forrester, video more than times more likely to result in a first-page Google result than traditional SEO. That’s an incredibly persuasive number. When it comes to conversion, just look at Zappos recent presentation at the recent Streaming Media West, where Zappos revealed that videos result in a 6-30% greater conversion in sales. That’s driving Zappos to strive for 50,000 videos produced next year. Those are numbers you can take to the bank!

WPN: Where are some good places to promote your videos, beyond the video sites themselves?

BW: If the goal is branding (which is tough in practicality to make work in online video) Google is your obvious target. Beyond that, you need to target specific vertical niches that are a solid fit with your brand, product, or service.

WPN: If there is any other video SEO advice you’d like to share, please feel free to do so.

BW: Getting video results to appear in Google is a science, so go to an expert who can help ensure that videos are indexed correctly. Google relies on title above all other meta-data to match results against searches, so make sure that you tune your title against the keywords you want to match. Matching page title tags to the video title is a good way to increase your score. To ensure that Google displays your preferred thumbnail, submit a single, rather than multiple thumbnails, in your feed. And lastly, make sure you submit both the web pages, and the videos themselves, to maximize your search results.

WebProNews would like to thank Mr. Wayne for answering our questions and sharing his insight with our readers.
 
On a related note, Topher Kohan, the SEO manager for CNN had some interesting things to say in a recent interview with WebPronews:

 Would you ask Wayne additional questions? Tell us what those would be.

Related Articles:

> Online Video Viewing Continues To Boom

> 35 Ways to Improve Your Online Video Performance

> Facebook Catapults Into Third Place Among Video Sites

"Recently I watched an episode of House, and they made a funny joke about the resemblance between Dr. Foreman (Omar Epps) and Pittsburgh Steelers coach Mike Tomlin. I couldn’t remember which episode it was in, let alone which moment of within the episode," says Hulu’s Eugene Wei. "With the new caption search, I just type in ‘mike tomlin’, and voila."

Users can hover their cursors over images to get quick previews. It will show a short segment of a video centered around the search term. This will play in the thumbnail.

This is a good example of how video search is going to be improving significantly. YouTube, the world’s most popular video site (and 2nd largest search engine) recently announced that it would be including automatic captions on videos. This makes videos much more searchable as far as dialogue goes.

"One bonus that comes with caption search is what we’re calling the heat map. This is a visual graph of the user interest throughout the span of a video and is available on any captioned video that has accumulated enough user views," says Wei. "It appears at the top of the captions tab for those videos. We analyze a variety of viewer behaviors to generate the heat map."

The heat map can be used as a navigation tool, and to find popular segments of video. Wei talks a bit more about the heat map aspect here.

Hulu’s Caption search is still just a beta feature, so it is subject to imperfections. The site is openly encouraging feedback via feedback@hulu.com.
 

Related Articles:

> YouTube Launching Automatic Video Captions

> Hulu Adds New Options to the Queue

> Hulu Makes More Search Improvements

The tips are all aimed at making your online video efforts more successful by optimizing them for search engine performance and ultimately driving more views and traffic back to your site. So, here they are in no particular order:

1. Encode video files with good metadata like titles, dates, authors, descriptions and keywords.

2. Offer multiple formats (e.g. mov, mpeg, mp4, flv).

3.  Include keywords (and the word "video") in the filename.

4. On the page, follow general SEO principles for optimizing (title, meta, H1, etc. tags and URLs).

5. Include contextually related links to articles and other videos on the page.

6. Post captions and/or abstracts as additional relevant on-page content.

7. Use Unique URLs.

8. Use one video per URL.

9. Use embedded players rather than pop-ups or links to files.

10. Create nav links to the video content.

11. Place video files in one central directory called "videos" off the root of your folder structure.

12. Enable comments.

13. Include social bookmarking tools.

14. Allow visitors to subscribe to your videos.

15. Let viewers grab your embed code – easily (with a link).

16. Remember internal linking (consider site-wide links in your page footer).

17. Distribute your video to the top video search sharing sites.

18. Include titles, descriptions & keywords on YouTube, etc.

19. Create a video site map with a mRSS feed.

20. Control associated page text to optimize for search engines.

21. Control the player (which may drive future video SEO).

22. Shorter videos are better.

23. Don’t spend a fortune.

24. Include end slates with URLs.

25. Drive people back to your site.

26. Thumbnail images matter.

27. Look for new opportunities for video placement (think about things like Google’s product search).

28. Figure out what keyword phrase is most relevant (and winnable) for your video.

29. Look into including videos in Google Place Pages.

30. Set up a Google video XML sitemap.

31. Use tools like Tubemogul’s to optimize metadata across the major video sharing sites.

32. Track viewership.

33. Advertise with video via rich search ads with Google/Yahoo and YouTube promoted videos.

34. Make sure your videos live on your domain and use 3rd parties for distribution purposes.

35. Stay on top of technology changes and new standards.

Do you have additional tips for increasing your online video success? Share them with WebProNews readers.

What factors influence a video universal result in Google? I have the same video – one on YouTube with high views, comments and ratings, yet the other one with low views and no comments is the one that ranks – why is this?

Cutts says that his first guess without knowing the specifics is that maybe the ranking video received links from a very reputable site, so it has more pagerank.

"We still do look at links. We still do look at pagerank whenever we’re trying to rank things," says Cutts. "So if this is the one that happened to get written up in a very sort of reputable location, then it couple be that this one has more pagerank and that’s why it outranks it."

Cutts says it’s strange, because if the other video is getting the comments, and the high views and ratings, then it must be getting some good word of mouth from somewhere, but perhaps it’s just not getting the links from reputable sources that the other one is.

The factors that influence a video universal result are often similar to factors that influence web search, according to Cutts. This means things like how well Google thinks a certain result will match in terms of topicality, and the reputation of a page are taken into consideration. Links can play a significant role in that.

YouTube has tweaked its masthead to eliminate some clutter and do some "housecleaning," as Product Manager Shiva Rajaraman puts it.

"We’ve streamlined and simplified the design to focus on the primary experience of YouTube: watching a video," says Rajaraman. "The left side is dedicated to exploration: finding videos to watch through search and browse. The right side is all about organization of the videos that matter most to you: your subscriptions, your recent viewing history, and your own uploads."

With the search feature given a bit more prominence, it may start to give YouTube a little bit more of a search engine feel, and inspire more searches. With YouTube starting its AdSense-esque advertising program, it’s not hard to understand why they might do this.

If you don’t have items in your Quicklist or Inbox, they will not appear on the homepage. The country and language pull-down menus are also gone from the masthead, and have been placed in the footer.

YouTube is also working on making the masthead more personalized, giving users more control. We’ll have to wait and see to find out what this means exactly.

The company has released a new set of feature enhancements, which improve the way Collecta handles pictures and video uploads in its real-time search stream. Searches now include vidoe feeds from 12seconds, uStream and Qik — tapping into the rising number of video clips uploaded from mobile phones, webcams, and digital cameras. Enhancements have also been made to how Collecta handles TwitPic and yfrog, two photo and media sharing services for Twitter.

"Analyzing traffic patterns since the launch has offered some interesting insights — we’re finding that a large number of users are keeping Collecta open between 30-60 minutes and often even more," said Gerry Campbell, CEO of Collecta. "This underscores the real power of Collecta and its endless stream of live updates and information. By letting a search run for an extended period, people can literally watch stories unfold right before their eyes."

He continued, "For example, it was fascinating to follow the shuttle launch on Collecta. At launch, posts spiked in Florida — with people posting pictures from their phones. Then just as updates started tapering down in Florida, we instantly started seeing posts pop up in Ireland, as the shuttle flew overhead with the bright orange fuel tank distinctly visible. Where else can people watch a global event evolve across the ocean, at the same time it’s happening?"

Collecta’s announcement comes just on the heels of Twitter’s home page redesign, which highlights its own search tool in a bigger way than ever before. Twitter Search could actually help Collecta though. The more average Twitter users that realize there is a purpose for real time search, the more they may realize that the concept could be applied to other sites/networks, and there are other search engines (like Collecta) out there that embody that.

"With the launch of the new Truveo.com, we are showcasing the breadth of content discoverable in our search engine," says Pete Kocks, who is President of Truveo, as well as Vice President of AOL. "With thousands of channels and TV shows in our index, Truveo has long been recognized as a leader in video search technology, and today we are building on that reputation with an improved experience that makes discovering and sharing video content even easier and more personalized."

Truveo boasts 25.6 million unique visitors, but more importantly to those visitors, it boasts over 350 million videos from thousands of sources. The update includes a redesigned homepage with improved search and browsing functionality as well as upgraded load times.

The update gives uers more personalized control over search. This includes navigation via channel, category, show, popularity, and most followed on Twitter. Searches can also be filtered to find videos from the users’ favorite channels and sites.

Also, Truveo has added more sharing features that let users save and send their favorite videos and search terms to friends through Facebook, MySpace, StumbleUpon and Bebo.

Truveo sites use localized ranking algorithms. This means results will be tailored to the user on a local level.

The new Truveo is available t Australia, Brazil, France, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Italy, Japan, Korea, Mexico, The Netherlands, Russia, Spain, Taiwan, Turkey, the UK, and the US.

In addition to the site’s relaunch, Truveo has entered partnerships with Univision Interactive Media and Tiscali Italia. The former is the most visited Spanish-language site among US Hispanics according to Truveo.

WebProNews received an email from them, and a spokesperson tells us, "VideoSurf is taking video search to the next level." He mentioned the following highlights:

- Improved search results – new methods to weed out irrelevant videos, spam and misleading thumbnails (did you know that 20% of all videos on the Web are spam?)

- People in the Spotlight – be entertained with videos of the most popular personalities on the Web, and discover related videos

- Homepage re-design that lets you discover videos that are related to what the world is buzzing about on Twitter, Google, etc.

That relevancy is probably the thing that people care most about when it comes to video search. Frankly it’s been an issue that has plagued video search in general.

"Search is what we do here," says  Margo Brockman on the VideoSurf blog.  It’s what we have a team of world renowned mathematicians constantly iterating on and tirelessly working to improve.  Our goal is always the same: better, more relevant results for your searches and a faster way to connect you to the videos you want to watch. 

The new release of VideoSurf is also designed to "attack" spam. The company says that over 20% of videos on the web are spam, and they have responded to this by improving the way they use their vision technology to automatically detect spam videos and algorithmically devalue them in their rankings before they make it onto the results page.

"Because other video sites are unable to see the video content, they can’t know that their users are being misled," explains Margo. "VideoSurf however, is able visually identify the problem and boost the video down in our search rankings automatically. We even take it a step further. If we need to show this video in our search results, VideoSurf is able to automatically correct the inaccurate thumbnail so that the leading thumbnail we show is more representative of what the video is actually about (all this in addition to showing you all the most important scenes in our Visual Summary)."

Margo provides the following example screenshot with a comparison between YouTube and VideoSurf results:

Youtube:

 VideoSurf:

 Duplicate videos often plague video search, and VideoSurf has this under control too. The company’s "Computer Vision technology" recognizes duplicate videos and groups them together to improve relevancy and save the user time.

"Other video site’s deduplication technology relies on matching up titles and start/stop times," explains Margo. "It’s not their fault; that’s all they have to work with. However, our ability to see inside videos lets us take this a step further. VideoSurf is able to identify each video’s unique visual DNA and match it against others in the index."

Features of VideoSurf’s new homepage include a hot searches feature, which pulls the most searched for terms across the web, the people in the spotlight feature, which is a collection of the most searched for people on the web, which if I understand correctly is in real time, and the Watchboxes feature, which appears to just be a featured videos section.

Have you tried the new VideoSurf yet? If so, let us know what you think of it.

EveryZing will also be deploying its universal search and publishing solutions across a number of NBCU’s Internet properties. The goal is to improve the video search experience for some major media sites.

CNBC would be one such site. "EveryZing’s core technology advantage and robust product offerings will assist us in taking full advantage of the content across many NBCU brands, ultimately enhancing the audience experience,” said Scott Drake, VP of CNBC Digital. "For example, CNBC’s users and viewers will be able to jump to the exact mention of their favorite guest, company or topic within the video and quickly consume the content most relevant to them."

It would not be surprising to start seeing more partnerships like the one NBCU has created with EveryZing as online video continues to take off in popularity and becomes a more important element to the web in general.

"The consumption and demand for online video continues to explode," explains EveryZing CEO Tom Wilde. "As such, media companies must continue to fully leverage their unique content assets in order to extend and enhance their business models. We are thrilled with this opportunity to have NBCU as a customer and Peacock as an investor."

The deal also brings to mind the importance for any business offering online video content to make their libraries easily navigable so usable. Ease of use and finding what they are looking for quickly are two elements that will keep users coming back. It’s something that should not go overlooked if you don’t want to get lost in an ever-growing sea of online video content.