Videos for the web are becoming the norm for promoting your company and getting your message across effectively. Video content time has proven time again a good way of getting peoples’ attention and an effective way of tapping into social media sharing via YouTube et al. Indeed, with over 800 million unique visitors a month YouTube has certainly not escaped the attention of small and large businesses for marketing their services and/or products. YouTube gained a new spin following Google’s acquisition in 2006, and many optimization tips ensued as it was clear the publication of video content entailed many SEO considerations.
We take your through some helpful optimization tips, extending beyond the usual ‘Make sure your Titles and Description are well optimized’ and create a video sitemap and submit to Webmaster Tools.
1. Video Content
Many publishers actually rush the most important aspect of Video SEO and that’s the actual content of the video. Something filmed on a mobile, and poorly thought out with no story line or anything that captivates your audience probably won’t go viral. Of course, we can always be proved wrong on this (especially the mobile aspect), Quicksilver created a great viral campaign using mobile footage and created a great gorilla style video which showed off their flair for creativity and impressive post-production techniques. But, you need a great concept behind the video and careful though and attention needs to be given to your messaging. Maintaining a professional image of your company or organisation is key, and the last thing you want is something that makes you look amateurish and become detrimental to the brand.
2. Video Hosting
Often companies will go straight to YouTube to upload their video content and not consider any of the other options of which they’re a few. For the best chances of your videos appearing in Google’s search results, it’s highly recommend you actually look at hosting the video on your own site or an off-site video hosting solution such as Brightcove if you don’t want to impact load times and have tons of video content. Doing this enables you to have full control of things like video titles, descriptions, and controlling the various attributes for creation of a video sitemap and submission to the major search engines.
3. Syndication
Some articles you read online tell you to get your video content out there in as many places as possible. Although, this might be applicable if you’ve got localized video content in multiple languages we find generally the best approach is to be more targeted and submission to contextual websites can be more effective. Of course, by all means submit your video content to YouTube, DailyMotion, Vimeo (especially for the creative industries), but also looking at more targeted video sharing community websites. Also, make sure if your video is hosted on your own domain or using a hosting solution ensure there’s social sharing integration to aid further seeding.
These are three main points to consider and ensure your video SEO starts in the right direction. If you have any further tips or recommendations, we’d love to hear them in the comments below.
Guest post by Dragonfly – a corporate video company with a difference.