How to Tag & Title Your Videos for Search: The New Media Minute Farewell Episode

Hey there I’m Daisy Whitney and this the farewell episode of the New Media Minute. For the final installment, I want to share an interview I did with Metacafe CEO Erick Hachenburg. The company that’s been known as a video sharing site re-launched as a network reaching more than 33 million unique visitors and is focused on delivering premium content and ads to men online, so I asked Erick for his tips to creators on getting your videos found, tagged and supported by advertisers. Here’s what he has to say.

Erick: One of the things is of course that the tagging has to be done well. There is still no strong algorithm that can accurately tag by just looking at the video and coming up with the words so you have to make sure that you identify all the major characters, obviously a consistent title. By the way the title, if it’s generic it’s going to be much harder to come up in a search engine then if it’s something unique. On the other hand it better be easy to spell because you know if they’re not going to type the correct one and it’s not going to be learned by Google unless it gets well known.

So tagging, you’re making sure it’s complete, it’s comprehensive but also being transparent about it. If you are misleading in your tags or you’re being too generic putting the word YouTube cause you think that means online video, those things are going to be discarded very, very quickly and possibly be considered spam. So it’s that aspect of it. I think the cross promotional aspect around content. The idea where many of the producers are now doing a lot of cross promotion whereas I’ll promote your video if you promote my video. I’ll refer to your video in my video and then having links to each other within the video so that you can start to have that sharing occur. And then the other thing I always talk about is just making sure you think about what would be appealing to advertisers if you’re interested in making money off of your content.

It’s easy to make something edgy and go into the R-rated area, but if you can keep it in the PG-13, you can avoid a lot of the issues that come up with your content just being put into a pile of controversial content.

Daisy: Thank you Erick and most of all thank you to the viewers that have watched the show for the last four and a half years. George Costanza said to end on a high note so that’s what I’m hoping to do. You’ll find me online covering new and traditional media for various outlets from media posts to synopsis to Blip TV and of course I’ll keep writing novels as well. I want to thank Natpe for its support over the years as well as my advertisers Digitalsmiths, Taboola and the Platform. I hope you’ll buy lots of books from me and lots of media wizbangery from them and thank you to my husband the guy behind the camera.