In the course of nearly thirty years knowing and working with search engine optimization guru Greg Jarboe, our conversations have always yielded a pile of new insights and ideas.  A ten-hour round-trip drive to New York with him this week was no exception, as we talked about the impact of tools like video search engines on our work with corporate clients.

One Jarboe’s big clients is the Christian Science Monitor, who created an extremely popular 11-part print-and-video series on reporter Jill Carroll’s time in captivity with Islamic jihadists in Iraq.  Jarboe was charged with finding ways to build traffic to this website.  Aside from the promotion in the pages of the newspaper, and the search-optimized news releases that Jarboe designed for CSM, Jarboe also urged his client to use the up-and-coming video search engines such as YouTube, and harness the tremendous traffic stream that these sites have developed in a very short time (see my earlier posts on the Video “Tipping Point” and YouTube’s Growth Chart).

The interesting thing is that Jarboe recommended that CSM not put the CSM video programs directly on YouTube.  Rather, he suggested that they create a compelling 43-second video tease that promoted the series on the CSM site.  He carefully crafted relevant tags and descriptions so that searches not only on “Jill Carroll” would turn up the promo, but also phrases like “Iraq hostage”.

The boost in traffic from the CSM/Carroll video tease represented an early success in a new battle for the eyes and ears of visitors to the web.  At this point, sophisticated marketers seem to have caught on to the importance of text search engine optimization — even to the point where some companies have raised its importance to the executive level (would you believe VP of Search?).  And news search engines have become the focus of whole new companies like the just-launched NewsForce, which does automated optimization of press releases.  But Jarboe’s CSM example suggests that the battle front may be expanding to include video search engines as well.

Companies will create entirely new video content designed specifically to channel some of the exciting new traffic flows of the video search engines to their websites.  And that is a far more acceptable alternative to putting the company’s primary video content directly onto YouTube or Google Video, where copyrights are largely ignored and the direct benefit of delivering video “in context” is largely lost.