Flimpbruary Day 16: Use a flimp for SEO purposes

Optimizing digital content that can be crawled by search engines is a critical web marketing strategy.  The whole purpose of creating a website is enabling people to locate your business or organization.  Until recently, online video was never included in the lexicon of search engine optimization (SEO).  Since search engines could not easily crawl flash or web content, most marketers did not use video as an SEO tactic.
The advent of YouTube, owned by the world’s largest search engine (Google), changed marketers’ perception of using video for SEO purposes.  Since search traffic is critical to Google’s success and because it owns YouTube, online video suddenly became a great way to generate a stronger performance in search results.
Most companies post their online content to YouTube in the hopes that it will help with search engine results.  But posting content to YouTube is only one way to generate a better search presentation.  Online video should be integrated into an organization’s website so it can directly benefit search performance.
SEO for traditional static content can be complicated enough without involving video.  Case in point:  the myriad of SEO consultants.  Since Flimp is a web video marketing solution, we help to simplify SEO for video.
In Distribute flimp makers can choose to generate source code that places keywords and search terms behind the flimp video landing page, making it optimized for search engine marketing. This is an easy way to embed video content into a website and to make sure the content can be crawled by search engines.
The “Optimize for Search Engine Marketing” distribution function does the following:

• Generates the flash code needed to embed your flimp into a webpage or blog so that it plays automatically when the webpage/blog is visited.
• Also includes the ability to put Search Engine Optimization (SEO) text within your embed code so that your flimp can be searched and found by search engines.
• Use this option if you intend on using your flimp as a landing page or as part of your website.
• The Flimp.net homepage uses this same exact technique for generating SEO behind our homepage flimp.

This is an automated process that enables non-technical users to copy and paste searchable text and terms behind their Flash® web content and videos that will automatically convert into search friendly HTML.  Search engines can crawl the content, improving the chance at being found through organic search.
Technically, how does this work?  The function automates a process called SWFObject, which many Web developers use to create searchable text behind Flash elements.  Until Flimp implemented this functionality, marketers without Flash programming expertise were unable to create or embed searchable text and terms behind their flash and flash video content.
SWFOject is used by many organizations to boost the search ranking for a video.  Flimp users can implement the same best-practices, even if they don’t have Flash skilled programmers on staff.
By enabling the flimp maker to generate the SEO code, marketers can free up their IT resources for other tasks.  Most importantly:  this option lets digital marketers maximize the searchability of their rich media content, enabling higher search rankings and more inbound lead generation.
Another key benefit: when flimps are integrated into web pages as SEO content, a flimp creator can chose to email an embedded flimp for email marketing campaigns.  What this means – instead of the emailed flimp pointing to a randomly assigned http://viewit.cc URL, it will point to the web page it is integrated into (such as http://www.flimp.net or whatever the organization’s web address is).  Even though the email flimp is pointing to the organization’s website, individual email address information will still appear in a flimp report.  This provides the value of enabling an organization to obtain branding, generate web traffic and also obtain at individual email address information.
Finally, flimp makers can decide what type of flimp they want to optimize for SEO.  This means that either just the video or an entire customized video landing page can be optimized.
ReelSEO is a good resource for information on how to optimize online video content for search optimization.