Top 10 Tips for Video Search Optimization
May 9th, 2008 by Mark Robertson
People usually love video, millions of Americans consume videos online and same is the case world over. A consumer is most likely to keep in mind and refer to a video in comparison to a print advertisement. These days video making is very economical as compared to the cost of a traditional commercial. Broadband is getting enormous popularity worldwide. Now people can watch videos without long download times or quality issues. Present generation considers video to be a reliable source of news and information. Online video for them is second to nature. Here are a few tips/hints for optimizing your video:
1) All SEO specialists know that the search engines are built to index and rank text. Being that it is more difficult for the search engines to understand the content within a video (though they are working on it), it is a good idea to include as much text surrounding the video itself if possible. One excellent way to do this is to include a text transcript of your video alongside your video with keyword rich title and descriptions.
2) Don’t forget to encode the keywords you are targeting into your video. Try to use the word “video” as much as possible, make sure the word “video” is used in your title, description, meta data etc.
3) Just as with normal techniques for SEO, it is just as important that you develop links to your video for off-page search engine optimization. Try to get as many quality links to your video as possible. Perhaps submit to social bookmarking sites and friend’s blogs.
4) It is advisable to create a separate sitemap just for your videos in your site and try to keep your video files in one directory this would help the web crawlers to locate your video files speedily and effortlessly.
5) It is very difficult for the web crawlers of any search engine to crawl into the video contents inside flash players so they usually prefer to stay away from such files. It is therefore advisable not to use such kind of file formats which discourages the web crawlers.
6) It is advisable to optimize the URLs of your video pages for the search engines with the help of mod_rewrite function so that the pages are freely assessable by the search engines.
7) The first thing that users see when browsing for or searching for videos is the video thumbnail. Research shows that the thumbnail you choose for your video can really effect the number of viewers that watch the video itself. Try to experiment with the thumbnails that you choose to see which ones create more interest and get seen more often by viewers.
If you are hosting videos on your own site, use the sitemap that we mentioned earlier and keep your videos all in the same directory folder so that search engines can more easily locate all the videos you are publishing.
In addition to the specific optimization techniques listed above, make sure that you also follow some common guidelines for online video content:
9) Always make sure viewers are searching for your targeted keywords regularly. If not, try to find the closest related keywords being searched.
10) Viewers who offer feedback are most likely to take the desired action on your video. This could be a good opportunity for you to submit fresh content, if the most popular videos were included months ago, it really helps.
About the Author:
This post was written by Mark Robertson of ReelSEO. ReelSEO is focused on Video SEO and Video Marketing. For more tips on video SEO and video marketing visit us at ReelSEO.