Editor’s note: In the following guest post, Fliqz CEO Benjamin Wayne reveals some of the secrets of using video to help boost the search results rankings of your website. Fliqz is an online video platform.

As most search engine optimization (SEO) experts are aware, getting a first-page Google result is harder than ever. Not only do Google’s search and indexing algorithms continue to evolve in complexity, but Google has given over more and more of its search results real estate to “blended” search results, displaying videos and images towards the top of the first page, and pushing down—and sometimes off the page—traditional web results that would have otherwise competed for top rankings.

But where problems arise, so do opportunities. Although Google’s newfound enthusiasm for video has created more competition for fewer traditional search results, it has enabled sites with video assets—even sites that would otherwise score poorly in the Google index—to successfully achieve first-page rankings. In fact, Forrester Research found that videos were 53 times more likely than traditional web pages to receive an organic first-page ranking.

Here’s what a blended search result looks like for the search query “777 built in 4 minutes“:

Those images at the top of the search results are video thumbnails, and today, there’s only two ways to get there:

1. Upload your video to YouTube.

The advantage of this is that you are 100% certain to be indexed into Google’s search engine. This does not guarantee you’ll get a first-page result, but at least it ensures that Google knows your content exists.

The drawback, of course, is that anyone who clicks on a YouTube result will be taken to YouTube, which may be fine if your goal is branding (i.e., you only care that people watch your video). If your goal is driving traffic, as is typically the case with SEO, this won’t be a successful strategy.

Your other alternative is:

2. Video SEO

Video SEO is a set of techniques designed to make sure that:

• Google finds your video content
• Google successfully indexes your video content
• Google will display your video content when specific keywords are entered as search terms

Here’s how to make it work:

You Need Video Content

Google is fairly flexible in what it considers to be video content. You can use actual video footage, but screen captures, slide shows, animated PowerPoint slides, and other content will work just as well. Google can’t actually “see” what’s inside the video content, so it relies on title and other meta-data to determine what content your video actually contains.

Submission, Not Discovery

With traditional web pages, Google utilizes crawlers to discover and index web content. Unfortunately, Google can’t read Flash very well (although it is trying), and as a result, most video content is invisible to Google’s search crawlers. Therefore, the best way to appear in Google’s blended search results is to submit your video to Google using a Video Sitemap. This is similar to an XML sitemap, but is formatted specifically for video, and only contains information about your video content. It is submitted using Google’s Webmaster Tools.

The most common error in Video SEO is to assume that because you have submitted the web page on which a video resides, that the video content itself is being indexed.

You’ll also need to make sure that you have a robots.txt file on all video pages, to ensure that Google can easily verify that the locations on the Web you’ve submitted do in fact exist, and that they contain embed codes which indicate the presence of a video.

Title and Title Tags

When ranking videos, Google primarily considers the match between search keywords and the video title. Although Google allows you to submit other meta-data such as description and keywords, these currently don’t have much influence on your search ranking. Google likes it when the title tag of the page matches the title of the video, and will give a higher weighting for results where this is the case.

Video SEO is Long Tail

Like traditional SEO, you’re much more likely to see results with Video SEO if you target more specific, or longer tail, search terms. A video titled “Dog” is unlikely to produce a first-page ranking, while a video titled “German Shepherd Police Dog” will be more likely to score well in Google’s algorithm. Since Google can’t determine the actual content of the video, you might consider submitting the same video multiple times with different titles that match potential search terms.

New and Small Don’t Matter

With traditional SEO, the age of a website is an important consideration for Google in deciding its ranking. Google also considers things like the number of pages on the site, and the number of links to the site, along with the importance of the places those links originate.

In Video SEO, none of this matters. This means that even new sites and small sites can compete on equal footing with larger and more established players. Publishers who are too small or too new to even consider traditional SEO can still be taking advantage of Video SEO opportunities.

For the Foreseeable Future, Video SEO is a Winning Strategy

As time goes by, Google’s discovery and indexing of video content will no doubt become more sophisticated, and as competition for video results increases, it will become harder for sites to achieve these first-page rankings. However, the number of web pages still massively outnumbers indexed video assets, and for as long as that continues, publishers will have an opportunity to jump to the top of Google’s search results through Video SEO.

In the fuzzy-wuzzy world of marketing ROI, SEO has long held a reputation as the most difficult, unpredictable, and potentially most lucrative areas of marketing spend.

Google’s search indexing algorithms are a closely-guarded secret, and their formulas for rewarding page content, meta-data, links, click-throughs and other cyber esoterica are complex and ever-changing, constantly reversing the fortunes of publishers competing for SEO supremacy.

SEO is a massive, multi-billion dollar industry with charlatans and snake oil salesmen aggressively peddling their services alongside more reputable professionals. While most publishers today feel that it is imperative that they have an SEO strategy, with a few relying completely on SEO for their traffic, very few are able to isolate the drivers of SEO success or to drive predictable and repeatable results, despite spending thousands, and sometimes tens of thousands, of dollars to optimize a single page or to target a single set of keywords.

Until now.

When Forrester Research noted in January of last year that Video SEO was 53 times more likely to drive a first page search result than traditional SEO, both media and marketers briefly took notice, and then moved on. Few sites implemented a Video SEO strategy, and publishers quietly went along doing the same things they had been doing for years.

Video content was in short supply. The methods for submitting it were complicated and poorly-documented. It was too hard, too new, too poorly understood.

But for those who made the effort, the rewards were nothing short of astonishing. On a regular basis, 1 in 8 videos produced first-page Google result, and some publishers saw results of 2 in 5 or better.

At these levels of efficacy, it’s not an understatement to say that in 2010, if you’re not pursuing Video SEO, you don’t really have an SEO strategy.

Here’s how it works:

• Videos need to reside on your site, ideally on a unique page whose Title tag matches the video title. It’s worth submitting other meta-data, such as descriptions and keywords, but for the moment, Google gives inordinate weight to title, and appears to ignore most other meta-data. Make sure that titles are specific: “2009 BMW 3 Series” is much more likely to produce a #1 ranking than “BMW”.

• You then need to create an XML video site map. This is similar to, but separate from, a traditional XML site map. (Do the XML site map also, but it’s really the video site map that’s crucial). It contains the location of all videos on your domain, and includes the video itself, meta-data, thumbnails, and other pertinent information. This video site map must then be submitted to Google via the Webmaster Tools, and validated by Google. The page will also need to contain a robots.txt file to assist Google in verifying the site map.

• Results should begin to appear in two weeks or less, and once the initial submission is approved by Google, new results should show up in 24 hours or less.

• If this all sounds complicated, the right partner can assist you in doing much of the heavy lifting for encoding, hosting, search engine submission, and tracking. If you do use a third-party, make certain that all traffic will be directed to your domain, rather than linking to a page hosted by the vendor.

Video SEO provides a predictable, affordable, and incredibly effective manner of garnering first-page and often #1 Google rankings. Results appear quickly, success is predictable, and at least for the moment, competition is light.

For marketers vying for a first page or #1 ranking, Video SEO is their shortest and surest path to success.

In the future, Google may reprioritize video, and increased competition may drive down the efficacy of Video SEO. But for now, and for the foreseeable future, Video SEO is the Google Goldmine.

Benjamin Wayne is CEO of Web video company Fliqz.