Search engine rankings can be mysterious for individuals setting up their web presence. Our clients seem surprised when we tell them Google reads the content of your site and knows how long someone spends there. Engaging content improves your natural search placement. Obviously, the way we like to do this is with video. That is our primary line of work, after all. But we also noticed that when we set up sites for our clients, the sites with video had better natural search results. The simple reason for this is that, even when someone who may not be from your expected client base visits your site and then spends 2-3 minutes or more watching a video before they return to google, those visits are interpreted as having a lot more relevance than a site that someone skimmed and hit the back button on their browser a couple of seconds later.

It is great to know much bigger fish agree, as we saw in a recent BBC interview with Brightcove chief executive Jeremy Allaire when he says, "If your website has video, then it will rank higher in Google rankings, it gives a natural lift in SEO. Users that engage with video spend more time on your website, and more time spent equals higher engagement whether you are Nike or an NGO."

Those 2-3 minutes of attention that you can grab can also be enough to turn a visitor into a client. "We have very clear data: Video drives higher sales, there is a conversion lift in the double digit percentages, and for some it translates into a 100% lift.," says Allaire.

The BBC article also discusses the sleeping giant of internet marketing. Okay, maybe sleeping giant isn't the right term, since nearly every internet user has used it at one time or another, but YouTube is rapidly becoming a major venue for companies looking to expand their social profile and online presence. Its social structure, combined with video, is changing how we promote and commuicate our businesses. Whit Andrews, an analyst with Gartner, an IT research and advisory firm, believes that "YouTube will have as much impact as Google in how we think about information" as people start to use "publicly hosted videos to accomplish tasks that would previously have been done in text."