Andy Plesser on Beet.TV recently interviewed Fred McIntyre who heads AOL video (”Forget Viral Video, It’s All about Search“). McIntyre talks about how to make video easy to find for search engines and, of course, customers. The article is slanted toward public relations and business video news releases, but the recommendations make sense for journalism as well. How accessible and easy to find do we make our content?

From the interview: Video clips are not searchable, per se, but the text appearing on the page where the video resides is searchable. If you create a video clip on, say hair color, and place it on a page and provide descriptive commentary, Google and the other search engines will find the relevant page where your video is. Bingo, you have searchable video. Some Web pages have more “Google juice,” meaning their content is maximized and come up higher in searches. There are many search maximization tools and services. I have found that the most effective way to make videos searchable is to put them on a blog. If a blog is updated regularly and has established cross links, searchability can be high. Entering search terms around the clip takes a bit of technique. But don’t be overly concerned with what you say, just explain what is being seen in the video on the page. I would use from 100 to 200 words in your commentary. -more