Optimizing Videos for SEO Hosted on Your Site
The world is changing, business is changing, and how you advertise your business is changing faster than ever before. Social media, PPC, SEO, and blogging are all critical to the success of your business’ advertising efforts, but the biggest shift in the marketplace today is in online video marketing. A growing segment of the population prefers watching and obtaining information from videos over traditional written formats. Therefore, understanding how to not only create videos but also optimizing videos for SEO will be extremely important when trying to drive more traffic to your site. The following tips for optimizing videos for SEO were taken from an article written Alex Harvey, a web developer for Fresh Egg.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3a2mHgFt6o[/youtube]
Optimizing Videos for SEO | Page Content
Other than the video on you page you will want to ensure that there is also sufficient static HTML content on the page. This way search engine spiders can obtain a fairly clear picture of what the page is about. You may want to consider adding a paragraph of text above or below the video describing its content. It’s easy to assume that everyone in the world has a fast connection these days, but it isn’t so. This way you will also be improving accessibility by allowing people on slower internet connections to find out what the video is about without having to wait for it to load. You should of course make sure your page title and meta description are in place and that the page URL is correctly formatted for SEO, but then you already knew this.
Optimizing Videos for SEO |Video Meta Data
It’s important to put keywords in to the videos meta data. You can tag each scene if you think it’s appropriate and remember to use your pre determined targeted keywords. It’s also useful to note that when people search for video they often use the word ‘video’ as part of their search term. Including the word ‘video’ in your title and description is a must.
Optimizing Videos for SEO | Backlinks
As with any web page, obtaining backlinks to the page with video on is a vital step to undertake in a successful SEO campaign. Optimising the anchor text for your backlinks is also another positive step you can take to help search engines understand the content of your video.
Optimizing Videos for SEO | Video Sitemap
As with all web pages, search engine spiders use sitemaps to locate and index your websites content. This is the same with video and you can create a video sitemap or media RSS feed to help search engines locate the video content on your website.
Optimizing Videos for SEO |Site Architecture
It is common practice to upload all of your images to one folder. The same practice is recommended with the videos on your website, be sure to upload all current and future videos to one folder, ideally called ‘videos’, and locate this folder on the root of the website.
Optimizing Videos for SEO |Social Media
Social media is starting to play a bigger part in ranking algorithms and with the Google +1 button on the way you no doubt want to incorporate social media onto your website. This is especially true for video as people pass links to videos around the likes of Twitter and Facebook daily. As such, utilising social media on your web pages containing video content is a great way to gain traction and encourage linking to the page. http://www.searchenginepeople.com/blog/optimise-video-google.html#ixzz1LbloiZ8H
In conclusion, being able to market your product, service, and message via multiple mediums will allow you to reach more people. The biggest opportunity to increase your market share quickly is through video marketing, and optimizing videos for SEO by following the above tips will improve your search rankings quickly.