I asked fellow blogger Morgan Linton of DomainVestors.tv to write a guest post for me. Morgan gets it, he realizes the importance of video for SEO. He gets it so much that he recently converted his standard text blog to 100% video. If you are not familiar with Morgan check him out at DomainVestors.tv.

For years SEO-experts have been writing keyword-rich content with carefully placed anchor-text to help drive their sites to the top of the search engines. In the early days of the Internet Yahoo was the search engine of choice. Well, it’s 2009 and Google is king of the pack, forget King, Google is the almighty ruler of search. With a large majority of the search engine market Google is the search engine to optimize for.

It should come as no surprise then that when Google makes major changes to their algorithm, sites that were once on page one could find themselves on the dreaded page two, or worse. As the Domaining world has made a clear shift from parking to development many Domainers have been putting-on their SEO hat for the first time. Unfortunately when you search for SEO tips online most sites will only talk about optimizing keywords and providing solid anchor text. This is still important, but more factors are coming-into play now that are dramatically changing how your site will rank with Google.

As a software developer in my past life I know how tiny changes in an algorithm can have a massive impact on data-sets. Google is making massive changes to their algorithm and there will be Domainers that benefit from this, as well as those who will watch their search-engine traffic literally disappear overnight. So what is changing? Believe it or not – it’s you, the web user that is changing, and Google is responding to it.

How is the average web user changing? Go back in time before YouTube and you’ll find that the online video market was just a niche. Broadband delivery of video was less-than-perfect and most web users digested their content by flat, text-only pages. Once YouTube became a hit, the Internet was changed forever because the web users tastes changed as well. People not only became comfortable watching videos online – many people preferred it.

In the brave new world that is 2009 there is a growing number of web users that prefer to access their news, information, content, whatever you want to call it, through video rather than text. 2008 was the first time we saw more users reading news online than with traditional newspapers and in 2009 we’re watching traditional newspapers go down the tube (no pun intended).

Google sees this trend and is responding to it with their search algorithm. In 2007 Google unveiled their Universal Search allowing users to view search results that were not just web pages but videos, images, books, news and maps. Now Google is continuing to improve their Personalized Search which pays attention to what people select from search results so that they can deliver future results based on their previous tastes.

Are you seeing where this is going? If more and more web users are looking for video content, and Google is using Personalized Search to deliver content in the format that users are looking for, then video is literally going to change the face of search, and its already happening. On top of this Google is looking for search results that deliver interactive content to their visitors. They know that a site might be more relevant to their visitors if it has both text and video about a given subject matter rather than just text alone.

So what can Domainers do to stay ahead of the trend? It’s time to break-out the camera and start talking about those keywords you’ve enjoyed typing for so many years. Chris Crum from WebProNews.com had an interesting post titled, How to Use Video to Improve Google Ranking & Conversions that touches on some of the points I’ve made in this article. Whether we like it or not, web users are becoming more and more comfortable watching their news rather than reading it, it’s not even close to a majority yet, but as we all know, these trends can change quickly.

Now don’t worry – the days of traditional SEO-optimization are not gone – these rules still apply and are still important. That being said, it’s time to realize that YouTube has changed the face of the Internet forever and made people realize that the Internet is more than just a collection of webpages, it is becoming a virtual video library. So don’t rush-out and record dozens of random videos for your sites – instead find targeted video content that would appeal to your site visitor. You don’t even have to make the video yourself – there are tons of video sources online like YouTube and Vimeo that make it easy to quickly add targeted video content to your site.

The web is changing, and with it comes a new set of expectations from the web user. There’s no turning back now, the time has come to give your visitors what they want, and it’s not just text anymore.

Thanks again to Morgan Linton of DomainVestors.tv.