Video Search Engine Optimization – A How To Guide
YouTube is the 3rd most popular website on the Internet behind Google and Facebook (from Alexa Top 500 Global Sites). What does that mean? People are regularly uploading, searching for and watching videos on the Web. Here are some essential tips to help you maximize your efforts towards your video content so you too can tap into the millions of people who are turning to videos to gain information.
1. Determine Where to Host Your Content Based on your Goals
If you want to use the video to bring customers to your site, and increase search referrals you should host it on your site. A properly optimized video can improve your search rankings for the right content. If you host the video on a third-party site like YouTube, the top search results for your video will probably be for the external site where your video resides instead of your own site, and you could miss out on the potential ranking.
If instead you want to show your video to the most amount of people you should host it on sites like YouTube. Mass-upload services can be used to get your video out to multiple video hosts. You can read more about the value of mass-uploading to determine if it will be worth pursuing for you and your company.
Popular sites that can host your videos:
• Youtube.com
• Metacafe.com
• Revver.com
• MySpace Videos
• Vimeo.com
• Dailymotion.com
• Viddler.com
• Yahoo Videos
• Google Videos
2. Optimize the Title and Description
The title and description should be aligned with the keyword strategy you have for your website and include key phrases from the video content. The description should be written in sentence form using keywords within the body of the text instead of just using a long list of keywords.
If you were going to write a description for a video about SEO in general, you want to write something like this: “In this video we discuss how to create a keyword strategy to improve your site’s rankings in terms of search engine optimization (SEO). We go on to describe why it is critical that the title tags, URLs, and copy are in alignment. You will also learn where else search engine crawlers look for relevant information after watching this video.”
What you don’t want your description to look like: “Video about optimized keywords, SEO video, title tags, URLs, good copy, Google bot.”
3. Utilize Transcriptions for Your Videos
Because search engines cannot understand the content in a video, you should include text transcripts for each video wherever you decide to host it. This should help improve your rankings and value to the search engines and video hosts because now they will have more information with which to determine your relevance.
Having transcripts for videos hosted on your own site will also increase the amount of textual content on your website giving you more opportunities to call out the key words and phrases that you want to rank for based on your keyword strategy.
4. Create Video Site Maps
A site map is used to help search engines index all the pages on your website by providing a short path (one or two clicks) to each page from one location. A video site map can be included within the site map for the whole site to help search engines index the videos you are hosting. Without this tool search engines may only be able to see the page on which the video resides, but not its content.
The video site map guideline from Google will help you get started.
5. Use Optimized URLs
Just as you would use URLs based on your overall keyword strategy for every other page on your site, the pages with the videos are no different. Try to incorporate a keyword or phrase that is relevant to the video within the URL.
This is a poor URL: http://www.yoursite.com/video123.html
Instead use something like this: http://www.yoursite.com/video/search-engine-optimization-tips.html
6. Less is More
The average length of the videos that are watched is just under 4 minutes. Watching a video is a time investment, and if the content isn’t interesting or relevant people will lose interest. If you’ve created a longer video presentation, try to break it down into a series of videos. You can then post videos on a schedule which will generate fresh content on your site or channel (if you’re hosting it at a third party site), and give you a boost towards your SEO each time you post.
7. Share the Video
Push the links to your videos out to all the social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Delicious, StumbleUpon, and Digg. Also involve your employees and tell them to spread the word via their own social media and LinkedInaccounts. Include a link to the videos in your email blasts and newsletters that you send to your subscribers as well. If the content is useful and relevant, the viewers will appreciate it.
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Have you tried some of these techniques for your own videos? Have you noticed any change in traffic and/or conversions after posting your videos on either your own site or on a 3rd-party host?
Tags: search engine optimization, video seo, vseo, youtube
