Last year Forrester Research found that webpages with videos were 52 times more likely to reach the front page of Google organically (without paying Google for the space) than those without.  It is therefore only natural that someone wanting to improve their web traffic will also be thinking of ways to integrate the video experience.

Thankfully, there are already a number of great articles on this topic:

• Tech Crunch article on how video improves search results
• SEOmoz video on preparing video for search engines and web viewers
• Mashable article on specific strategies for improving video SEO

I strongly recommend all three to anyone who wants to improve their SEO with video.  But if I you just want the short, short version, here’s what it boils down to:

1 Know your objective

Different goals have different video strategies.  Make sure you have your goal in mind so that you know how to title your video, and how to gauge the success of your campaign.

2  Brand your videos

Video branding doesn’t just mean slapping on a logo, or loading the title with keywords.  Good video series have a consistent approach that shows off your company’s character (just take a look at SEOmoz’s Whiteboard Fridays).

3 Publish links to where the video appears on your site

YouTube, Vimeo, Metcafe, and the like are all massive, well-trusted sites (at least in the Google sense).  They will suck in search engine juice like nobody’s business if you don’t get people to watch your videos on your site.  Do your best to get your own links out into social media channels, and give people who do visit your YouTube (or Vimeo, or Metcafe…) site a reason to also visit your website.

4 Integrate supporting text

Any video-hosting site worth its salt will have a place for comments and description, and YouTube now allows people to mesh captions with their video timeline.  Use these fields to include a cleaned up and edited transcript.  Not only is this useful for accessibility reasons, but it will also make the content of your video searchable.*

* If you’ve ever used Google Voice, you know just how buggy audio recognition software can be