<br/><a href="http://video.msn.com/video.aspx?vid=ff8e68cd-3c85-4e0e-bcfd-e6510687e218" target="_new" title="LiveSearch Project Manager Henry Hall Explains Video Optimization at the NYC SES">Video: LiveSearch Project Manager Henry Hall Explains Video Optimization at the NYC SES</a>

Henry Hall:
My name is Henry Hall. I'm Senior Product Manager for Video and Image Search with Live Search and the focus of our product, as it relates to video, is really focused around helping people simplify key tasks. So it's not just video in and of itself only for video, but video associated with something that someone is trying to accomplish. The categories we really like to focus on, outside of entertainment and news - the categories where you see a lot of videos already - are travel, health, local. Those are kind of the three areas where people are really trying to accomplish a task and often they tell us in the research that we've done, that video really helps them actually accomplish those tasks a lot better.

So we'll do a lot of research on the text web, if you will, and then they'll say along with the text web, I'd like to associate video. We cannot crawl every site, because video is so difficult to discover, but the general rules of SEO, the same ones that apply to your text web, also apply to your video web. So just follow those general rules, make sure you have your metadata in place, make sure it's close to your images or your video that you have on the site.

Dallas Plummer:
Could you explain what metadata is?

Henry Hall:
Metadata is anything that describes a particular form of media. So if I put a picture of a BMW on my blog or on my website, I should put the description of that picture somewhere nearby in html. It should say BMW M5 or BMW 3 Series. It may be some description of what's in that image somewhere in the code that's near that page. That's called the metadata. The same rule for images also applies for video. But I will tell you video is a little bit harder to discover.

What I'd also say, if you're trying to do video optimization, is to make sure that you post your video wherever you can. We have a property called MSN video, it's another Microsoft property, and they have a feature on there called Soapbox where you can upload a video. Make sure you upload a video to Dailymotion, Metacafe, YouTube... just upload your video as many places as you can, and that way a search engine has the best opportunity to discover it. If you're really trying to position your business or your product towards something that is the focus of a lot of companies, I would say really think about travel, local, shopping, and healthcare. Those are categories that really need video and the content out there isn't all that good today. So that's a place where I would really position myself if I were just doing independent SEO work for video.

Dallas Plummer:
Thank you.