At the March 2008 Search Engine Strategies Conference and Expo in New York City, one of my favorite creative marketers, Gregory Markel, gave some tips about online video and video optimization. Here are my takeaways:

• Using video online is free and you need to do it. If you don’t, you’ll be quickly left behind.
• Web-enabled cell phones and sophisticated hand held devices, like Blackberries,  are quickly accelerating the momentum of online video.
• Videos can help with brand reputation management by occupying space in the SERPs (Search Engines Reults Pages) and pushing non-complimentary pages down or off the page.

The most popular video sites are:

• Google (which includes YouTube)
• Fox Interactive
• Yahoo sites
• AOL

There are three phases for optimizing video:

• Video file and page optimization. Optimizing the video title, description and tags can help immensely, even if you don’t do anything else.
• Upload optimization. Uploading videos is very labor intensive and placing yours in all the right categories is extremely important. However, if you ‘re willing to put in the time, this can really pay off.
• RSS optimization. Optimizing your RSS feed can help to get your videos noticed, indexed and ranked.

The hidden gem in Markel’s presentation was the tip to use TubeMogul.com, a website that uploads your videos to 12 video search engines at once. What a great time saver. Thanks, Gregory!