Guerilla Gear Thinking of Digital Video Expo

I was looking for upcoming video industry conferences and came across the Digital Video Expo in Pasadena, CA from September 19 – 21 at the Pasadena Convention Center. This expo has been going on for over ten years and offers opportunities to network with over 6,000 video industry professionals. The expo also offers a wide variety of conference sessions that cover pretty much any angle of creating HD digital content.

Now when I stumbled upon this convention, it had me very interested and immediately wanted to try and get Guerilla Gear entered into but I wanted to find some feedback from attendees as to what the expo is like. I found a couple of interesting articles that didn’t really paint it the glamorous event that it was made out to be.

The first one I found came from an individual named Radraven and was written in 2009. When she first starts talking about going to the DV Expo, she sounds excited to finally be getting back to her roots of video conventions. She goes on to say how the convention as a whole has dwindled in scale from what she remembered. It had been three years since she had last been there but the difference was noticeable.

The second article I found came from Fred Ginsburg and was a review of the DV Expo from 2011. He even talks about how much smaller the convention has become but despite that, there is still quality information and products that are there.

Both of these articles talk about how the convention circuit has been getting smaller and smaller each year but yet there are still companies out there that are willing to show at them. Even so, will there come a time when these conventions are no longer put on? Radraven says, and I have to agree with her, that there is no comparison with physically holding a product in your hand and looking it over with your very own eyes versus looking at numerous photos of something. Even if every angle was pictured.

Personally, I’d like to think that these conventions are invaluable. Who’s to say that the person you strike a conversation with doesn’t become your next biggest client/buyer/business investor/accountant? To me, the chance to network with so many professionals carries more value then the $1000 it costs to attend and around $4100 it costs have a vendors tent. Either way…you can write it all off come tax time.  

Good Video SEO Tips

As my business, Guerilla Gear, starts to break into the industry, I figure that the videos we will use to demonstrate our equipment will need to be found easily when people search for them or videos like them. I wanted to get some information on how would be an ideal way to get my videos to the forefront of search engines and found a couple of really helpful articles.

The first article had some really good information but what I found the most helpful were the three tips on optimizing hosted video on SEO; Delivery, Content and Links. Not only do we plan on having videos on You Tube but we will have videos hosted on our own website as well.  I want people to be drawn to our website as much as possible and these tips were very helpful but the one tip that stuck out to me the most of the three was Delivery.

By having our website be flexible and accessible to many different formats and readers, we will cast a bigger net and catch the eyes of more viewers. As of right now, our website is built to use Flash and I’ve found out that Flash based websites aren’t really search engine friendly and that they rarely work when trying to be viewed on a mobile device.

The second article talked about a number of different things as well and what I found most interesting was that with video SEO, a website’s age isn’t important. Google doesn’t take age into a video SEO so even small companies can compete at the same level as the big guys when it comes to using video to generate business.

The main theme I found between these two articles, as that content is paramount. The better you describe your site with Long Tail descriptions or submit more meta data, the better your business will fit search engines’ algorithms. When our website can start doing that, I’m sure we will notice a big difference in our orders.