All You Need to Know About Video SEO
Background – do some research with Google Analytics to discover where the visitors of your video are coming from as well as what percentage of your video traffic is arriving from search engines and what percentage of your traffic is coming from referring sites such as video sharing services. These matrices inform your decision of whether to host your video content or to share it. Hosting it puts you in control of the keywords, metadata and monetization of the content, however sharing is an easy technique to get maximum views.
Video content is a great way of generating interest from the online community, whether it’s for driving direct traffic to your site or gaining those all important inbound links, however the search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing are still not quite able to read video content. But fear not, because below are some quick and easy techniques you can employ in order to successfully optimise your video material.
Title Tags and Meta Data: Google, Yahoo and Bing can’t yet read video content therefore you must inform them what it is via the title tags and meta data. Ensure your in-file metadata is keyword rich as well as including the word ‘video’ in it – this will tell the search engines what the content actually is and so makes it far more likely that it’ll be picked up by their algorithm. Create video sitemaps so that the search engines can easily find the content, and thoroughly optimise your video landing pages including all your targeted keywords.
You can also hire a transcription service that will write out a transcript of the entire content of your video, this is only really necessary if you want to rank for particular keywords mentioned in the material. In addition, make the title of your video enticing so that when your video does rank, users will want to click the link and watch it.
To host or not to host? That is the question. This returns back to my initial point about the background data, what is your aim with your video content? If it’s viral marketing then exploiting video sharing websites such as YouTube, Blinkx, Blip.TV, MetaCafe and Vimeo can improve your video traffic vastly, not only with viewings but also if you can get a link in the “related videos” section.
There are also services such as Tubemogul and TrafficGeyser which act like video search engines and allow you to upload your video to more than one video sharing site at once. However by utilizing services such as these you’re giving away a lot of link equity because it’s likely that your video will start to rank for these sites rather than your own, as users are linking to your video on these sites rather than linking to the original video on your site.
Similarly, consider enabling social bookmarking tools for sites such as Delicious, Digg and StumbleUpon. These will help proliferate your video content further, plus you can include a link to your site where the file can originally be found, which will drive more traffic to your chosen destination. Viral marketing opportunities are an excellent form of distribution and publicity.
A popular technique is to initially host the video on your own site and see how it performs. It is better to limit yourself to one video per URL; this simplicity is more search engine friendly, and in the same vein rather than pop-ups, embed your file into the page itself with its own player that supports all video formats. If you want more views and better accessibility then start to exploit some of the avenues mentioned above. Always give your audience the chance to subscribe to you video content through RSS feeds; this is an easy way to build up regular viewers and inform them of new material.
Remember – community is a big part of search engine optimisation and you should encourage interaction and sharing by making your embed code available to all your site visitors, this way your video can disseminate across the web without you lifting a finger. This not only gets you views but also helps to build a relationship with the blogosphere which you later capitalise on and offer more content in the future.
Good luck and keep it reel.
