Combine that with the accessibility of video through multiple devices and you are onto a winner if you do it right.

A common misconception when it comes to video is that it will cost lots of money to produce a quality piece of content. This is not the case.

When it comes to your video content strategy there are certain elements that you need to consider like your target audience and what you want to achieve from the content.

First Steps

The important thing to establish before you start conjuring up your epic scenes is what message you want to deliver?

The metrics you should be striving to achieve are strong brand awareness, increasing your organic traffic and conversions and a large amount of social shares.

Some of the most popular videos are just talking heads pieces or people explaining something with a whiteboard.

Google’s head of webspam team Matt Cutts regularly produces pieces of video where he is talking to a camera and explaining a new update from Google or an algorithm change.

This video about what to expect in terms of SEO for Google was uploaded in May and has had nearly 160,000 views.

SEO expert and Moz Founder Rand Fishkin posts a weekly video series called ‘Whiteboard Friday’, which receives large amounts of views and high levels of social shares week in week out.

He talks about various SEO news and strategies in front of (yes you guessed it) a whiteboard.

This clearly does not break the bank and allows Fishkin to deliver his message to his appropriate audience of fellow SEOs and digital enthusiasts.

Money Saving Hints and Tips

So how do you make a top video without spending a lot? Again, this will depend on the objective of your content and the exposure you want. One effective way to achieve this is to edit video online.

A good place to start is getting your lighting right. You can pick up some tungsten lights or a floodlight kit, which will dramatically improve the clarity of your video.

You can also get a tripod on the cheap and make sure you get a good microphone. The trick with the mic is to get it as close to the speaker’s face as possible.

The most important thing is obviously the camera. A good SLR digital camera on a tripod will record excellent video but you can make a strong video with a top of the range camera phone these days.

Set up your lighting to get rid of any shadows so that your viewer is focusing entirely on the image in front of them.

There are some excellent online resources to assist you when it comes to making your own video like videocopilot and finalcutking.

Optimizing Your Video

A really valuable way of optimizing your video is by setting up author rich snippets, especially if you choose YouTube as your hosting platform.

Rich snippets were previously available for Google+ authors but they can also be used in SERPs for video.

Setting up rich snippets is really simple but you will need a Google+ account and a YouTube channel.

You link your Google+ account to your YouTube channel and vica versa before verifying your content with the rich snippet testing tool.

The benefits of adding rich snippets to your video content will be a higher ranking in search results and therefore wider exposure.

Here is a great article on how to easily set up rich snippets for your video content.

This may sound really simple but it is essential to embed your video on the webpage you want to rank for. Lots of people will just upload their video content on their homepage.

Whichever hosting platform (YouTube, Vimeo etc.) you choose make sure that you are getting the link benefit back to your site rather than the hosting platform.

If you just whack your video onto YouTube, chances are you won’t get many links back to your site. Therefore it is essential to start with the video available on your domain.

Other Options

Due to the fact that video content is so readily available, there are plenty of other editing options when it comes to producing your video.

Vine and Instagram are two mobile options with basic editing functions and there is also Google+ Hangouts.

Adidas Originals promoted the release of their new Marathon City Pack footwear with a series of Instagram videos in various cities.

Here is the popular New York version, which received over 20,000 likes.

You can also consider built in editing tools such as Windows Movie Maker or iMovie.

These options will allow you to be creative and underline the fact that you don’t have to be a skilled videographer to make top video content.

Time to Make Your Video

So when it comes to creating your new video content take the time to think what your audience want from you and how they will interact with the content.

Understand what your objectives are from producing a video and set goals for what you want to achieve from it.

Self-host your content on your site to increase organic traffic and conversions, use hosting platforms for brand awareness and combine both to improve your links and social shares.

Making great video content should not cost you lots and by ensuring you have things like good tungsten lighting with a tripod set up, you can make some stunningly clear and effective video.

So whether you are a big brand or small business great video is available at your fingertips and you don’t need to be an expert.

Be creative and enjoy the process.

99% blogger around you will answer that Putting Keyword in Title, URL, Image and creating Backlinks.

Do you really think that SEO is all about putting keywords in different places and creating backlinks? If so then I must say that you don’t know anything about SEO.

If SEO is so simple then every blog would have achieved #1 in SERP.

Lets Discuss basics of SEO

It is very important to understand the basics of SEO.

“SEO is a process to put quality content on top in SERP so that end user will get their desired result in minimum effort.”

If you read the above sentence carefully then you will came to know that there are two other factor that decides your ranking.

1. Search Engine
2. User

How User and Search Engine affects Ranking?

‘Search engines’ captures user behavior to decide domain ranking.

E.g. If a user search something and visit your blog/website from search results and found that your content is not suitable for them and he goes back to search engine to search more pages for same search term.

Search engine capture this and it gives the idea to search engine that either your content is not of high quality for that search term or your content doesn’t belong to that search term (means you have falsely optimized your content for that keyword). Search engine degrade your ranking for that keyword.

This decision taken by search engine algorithm based on several instances.

Similarly if your URL is coming on 2nd or 3^rd page of search engine for a particular search term but people is finding your article useful and you are getting great CTR for that page and search term then Search Engine improve your ranking.

People and Search Engine like Fresh Content

No likes to read out dated content because information in these articles not relevant with the time.

Most of the people say that Fresh means provide daily fresh new content; they are right but what about your old content? You have put so much effort on them and they have been appreciated by your readers in the past.

So you have to revamped or re-written your old articles to keep them fresh in terms of information, format and SEO.

Intelligent bloggers revamped their old articles on regular basis to get long term benefit from their old articles.

All your old articles are foundation of your blog and if your foundation is strong then you will reap benefit from your blog in future as well.

Increase Engagement with readers

I know you are thinking how engagement with readers is related with SEO but it is purely related with SEO. Let me explain how

When you start engaging with your readers, you start to know what exactly they want from you. If you provide what your readers what then your readers will start visiting your blog more frequently and start sharing your articles in their circle.

Search Engines likes those articles to be put on top in SERP which are like and share by user. ‘Search Engines’ have started give preference to social signals (e.g. Like, Share, +1 etc) so more people will share your article more strong your social signal will be.

So again I am asking same question – “Do you really know SEO”?

Till now you have realized that SEO is not all about placing Keywords in different places and creating backlinks; it is much more than that and if you will now were busy in keywords and backlinks only then change your thinking process about SEO otherwise sooner or later you will be ended up with Search Engine penalties only.

Once you start knowing about your niche, market, readers and latest trends then you will realize that SEO is much more than keywords and backlinks. SEO is an art and it takes time to be expertise in it.

Take different aspects of SEO as challenge to yourself and start working on it. Try to understand true mechanism of SEO and hidden areas of it. Once you start doing it then you will enjoy the lots of targeted traffic, sales and conversion.

What’s your view and understanding about SEO; we love to hear your definition of SEO. Share your feedback using comment section.