Video SEO

VIDEO SEO

Paying attention to search engine optimisation principles can greatly benefit the performance of your video.  This post is concerned with providing you with a basic understanding of Video SEO.

The Video Strategy 

Video content should be part of your website promotion strategy as people really like it and it can be easier to rank video content for competitive keywords than ‘normal’ content when video results are incorporated into the search engine results pages. If you’re not using video content, you will be behind the curve.

 

I’ll shared with you a few tips:

 

• Allowing comments on your YouTube videos as it helps improve rankings

 

• Make sure your videos have captions as this improves users experience and understanding

 

• Include keywords in your file name

 

Don’t Host Your Videos only YouTube.

YouTube is a good source of getting views for your videos as it is the second largest search engine, but it isn’t always the best place to host your videos. If the keywords you are targeting cause video results to turn up in the search results, then you should not host the video on YouTube, rather, host it on your own site.

 

An additional consideration is that YouTube views rarely turn into website traffic. If your main goal is to drive more traffic to your website, you should host the video on your own site.

 

If you want the video on your site instead of YouTube, you don’t have to host yourself. There are many video hosting services out there that will not only let you embed the video (as YouTube does), but they go further and provide you with a video XML sitemap, attributing ownership of the video to your site.

 

Video XML Sitemaps

If you want the video on your site rather than YouTube, create a video XML sitemap and submit it in Google Webmaster Tools. This will help Google to discover this content (but it won’t impact your rankings). If you use a service like Wistia, they will generate a video XML sitemap for you that you can submit.

 

If you want to make your own, here are some things to keep in mind.

 

There are five basic requirements for a video XML sitemap – you must provide the following for every video:

 

• Title
• Description
• URL of the play page – the page you want to show up in search results
• URL for the thumbnail you want associated with the video
• URL for the raw file location or the URL for the player location

 If you are putting the video on YouTube or Vimeo, you will have to use the URL for the player location rather than the URL of the raw file location. Further, if you are putting your video on YouTube or Vimeo, you should still provide a video sitemap as this will provide more meta data for the video.

 

Additionally, keep in mind that an XML sitemap can only have 50,000 entries.

 

Keyword Research

 Though it seems really basic to state the value in keyword research, it is frequently a process that is overlooked for video content. If you are planning on hosting the video on YouTube, look at these tools:

 

YouTube Keyword Tool

Sometimes you can get some good data from this YouTube Keyword tool, but it can also provide you with a frustrating experience as it is not always complete for your chosen. Once you have determined your keywords, make sure to use them in the:

 Video Title

1. Video Title
2. File Name
3. Video description
4. Closed caption/transcript file
5. Comments
6. Surrounding text (if the video is hosted on your site)

 Transcribe Your Videos

 As Google can’t determine the content of a video like they can do for a blog post, Google won’t really know the content of the video unless you tell them exactly what’s in it. The solution is to transcribe your videos and put the content below the video.

 

Export Your Video in HD

 Videos that are exported in HD tend to perform better than those that aren’t. YouTube won’t know the difference between a video that is filmed in HD and one that is filmed in SD and simply exported in HD. That in mind, it is really important to make sure it can scale from 1920 x 1080 down to the actual player size.

 

There could be a lot of factors playing into this but as a best practice, you will want to film (or export) in the highest quality possible. This is true for both videos that you put on YouTube and host yourself.

 

Summary

 Video marketing should be part of your content strategy like the pages on your website. Google provides video entries are part of their search engines result pages for chosen keywords but YouTube does not list Google entries – only YouTube videos and presentations are listed on YouTube. This is a huge marketing advantage. Follow the tips in the post and you will be listed on the first pages on Google for your keyword.  To learn more go to our website on video marketing.