The soaring popularity of social media has fueled the increase of rich multimedia content on the web. Gone are the days of plain text and frisky images... Now, its all about how interactive the content is and when it comes to interactivity, there is no match for videos.

Online videos are increasingly becoming a big hit among the web users, and therefore businesses cant afford to ignore it. Moreover, online videos can be a great way to spread brand awareness and engage audiences, not to mention its SEO benefits.

Here are some tips to optimize your videos on the web and use them to promote your business:

Optimize for Search Engines

All popular search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing have come to offer blended search results to users that includes videos occupying a prime space. Thus optimizing your videos for search engines allows you to cash in on the space and get popular. Even though Google, at present, does not index video level meta-data, it does consider the Title Tags. Therefore, make sure the title tag of your video is potent with your target keywords and also don't forget to match it with the title of your video to score extra points. Bing, at its end, has a team of human editors who curate the results that appear within Bing Video results... so relevancy is the key to score well here.

Submit Videos to Multiple Channels

Though YouTube has the lion's share of online video audience, businesses shouldn't stop their focus there. In fact, if you want to drive traffic to your website through your online videos, don't stop at YouTube. Check out other video submission websites on the web and include Bing and AOL in your list. Another great tip is to share videos on Facebook and make it available to everyone. The key is to target niches that best compatible with your brand and your products and services.

Use YouTube Caption Features

YouTube's captions features are great to optimize the content of your videos. Captions not only help the deaf and hearing impaired to access the content they also make it available (and accessible) to people around the world by translating it into several international languages. Moreover, captions can also significantly improve search and even enable users to jump to the exact parts of the videos they're looking for. So make sure you use relevant and keyword rich captions in your videos!

Submit Carefully

While making the submissions, include a single thumbnail instead of many in your feed. This will ensure that Google displays only what you want it to show. Also, make sure you submit both the web pages, and the videos themselves, to maximize your search results.

Be Careful About the Weight

Take care your videos don't become overtly bulky lest it has a negative implication. And with Google giving increased importance to factors like Page Speed, it has become all the more important to lighten your content. So make sure you have your videos in a good format preferably .flv (the lightest one)

Kabir Bedi works as a senior web consultant at LeXolution IT Services, a renowned offshore web development company based in India. With over 10 years of experience in the outsource web designing services industry, he advices his clients to establish a firmer and more profitable web presence.