I own investment property in Murrells Inlet, SC. This fall, I decided to list the property for sale. During our vacation, we shot video of the home and the community. So my son edited the raw video and placed in our You Tube. I gave him a description and set of keywords targeting people looking for local town homes.

The tags for my video were :

“murrells inlet myrtle beach townhome condo for sale south carolina home garden city golf waceamaw hospital”

This evening I did a You Tube search for “murrells inlet townhouse” and was pleased to see our video was #1 on the results page. The second video is another townhouse for sale in the same community. Investigating why our video showed before our neighbor’s, I discovered some sharp contrast in their video tags

The tags for my neighbor’s video were:

“murrells inlet homes for wynbrooke townhouse murrells inlet condo screalestatepartners jake lee real estate jake lee ann mckinnon”

In comparing several variations of local search results, I believe there were strengths and weaknesses to both approaches:

1) Our home showed up #1 for “murrells inlet townhouse”, “murrells inlet townhouses”, “murrells inlet townhomes”, and “murrells inlet townhome”. I believe my neighbor’s usage of “murrells inlet homes for” as a single entry in their video tag was a mistake and they should have gone with a targeted geo tag, either “murrells inlet” or “myrtle beach”.

2) My neighbor’s property showed up first for “wynbrooke townhome” – in fact, my home didn’t display because I made the mistake of leaving our community name – Wynbrooke – off out tag list. This was a mistake and I’m going to fix it.

3) My home shows up at the bottom of the results for the more competitive search terms “myrtle beach townhome” and “myrtle beach townhomes”. My neighbor didn’t target the metro area “myrtle beach” in their title or tags. I believe this was a mistake and limited their video’s reach.

Here is what I learned from this exercise:

1) When you geo tag a local video on You Tube, target the metro area, county, city/town, and community. This gives you broad reach to target internet users searching for videos about a specific area.

2) Use a geo name in your video’s title to help support your tag list. Also seed your video description with a few geo names you were not able to target in your video title.

3) Use more shorter tags vs. fewer longer tags. Try to use the city name as a standalone tag instead of combining it with the state name or the product or service represented in the video. These keywords are important and the state name, product, or service deserve to be a standalone tag.

I believe these suggestions will help your videos appear at the top of You Tube’s local search results.

Many people have not used Geo Tags but now that local search is forcing more businesses into utilizing their web presence more effectively Geo Tags will be something more and more web developers start to utilize.

Here is an example of how the meta tags look when in use:

<meta name="geo.placename" content="Park Hills, Missouri">
<meta name="geo.region" content="US-M0">
<meta name="geo.position" content="37.84930;-90.52660">

As you can see the “geo.placename” tag allows the insertion of the town or city that the site is targeting.

The “geo.region” tag allows the developer to specify the region, in this case Missouri.

And lastly, the “geo.position” tag allows the latitude and longitude to be set.

Although it is still unclear how much weight the search engines put into these tags it is important that you utilize what tools are available to develop your site properly.

For more information on Geo Tags visit:

Geotagging – Wikipedia