TV Writers: SEO Your Scripts!
by guest blogger, Matt Meeksoriginally located here: http://bit.ly/dkCjnfOne of the beautiful things about the Internet is that everybody can now market themselves and their content in exciting new ways; and, many are doing a great job of it. One look at Felicia Day’s work over the past three years will tell you that there is something to this whole Internet business. As a sidenote, last night I re-watched the Guild Season 1 on Netflix - awesome.Anyway, we all know that online marketing is nothing new, but one of the earliest online marketing tools, search engine optimization, can now be used to put Web video content in front of new audiences. While SEO has been around for a long time, Web television is still in its infancy. Today, script optimization presents a huge opportunity for content creators to promote video content; and as far as I have seen, nobody is openly taking advantage of it.Recently, Hulu announced that they have enabled closed caption search, which means that you can now insert popular search terms into your scripts to help shows index. In addition to Hulu, YouTube and Google have been doing this for even longer. If you don’t believe me, check out the following video to see closed captioning SEO actually work: http://bit.ly/11G2icOptimizing YouTube is easy, because a little something called AdWords exists to tell you what people are searching for in Google. Due to the fact that Google owns YouTube, this is probably a good place to start.Unfortunately, there is no Hulu “AdWords,” so when optimizing a video for Hulu I would stick to what Hulu’s audience is looking for. First, I would look at the Hulu homepage. Outside of that, Hulu users are searching for timely news items and top network television shows.So, my advice to content creators is this: become a news source. Host a weekly video series discussing the top news or a roundup of network television shows and what you, as independent writers, think about them. Doing this may just land you a coveted spot on Hulu, somewhere between a clip of Peter Griffin fighting a chicken and that Shy Ronnie SNL skit.My advice to studios - hire some internal Internet savvy people and put them on your creative teams. So far, you are failing in this regard. Put one marketer on your writing staff. Hire junior writers to take background character work and use this to strategically infiltrate the Internet with Twitter accounts, blogs, etc. Let your characters live and breathe online (Hint: all of this activity can be optimized as well).My advice to content destination sites - provide creators with your search data. Sure, you will probably be flooded with a bunch of spam videos but tweaking your search algorithms can filter those out; and, on the up side your site traffic will go through the roof.Anyway, just my thoughts on it all. Let the games begin.@MattMeeks