Make Your Videos Rank on the Search Engines - Back to the Basics
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You could start with the items that you already know the major search engines can index well. The most obvious of these is text. So you might consider including a transcript of the video on your web site, or at least a summary that hits on the key points. Having transcribed some lengthy video myself, I know how time-consuming that can be. Fortunately, that's not all you can do to help the search engines find you.
Remember your basic SEO skills and look to where you can optimize. For example, what file name did you give the video? Was it something like "122706-tut.mov"? That might have meaning to you, but it means nothing to a search engine. Try for something a little more descriptive, like "December-SEO-Basics-Tutorial.mov" to help both the search engines and your visitors know what that video contains.
File names aren't the only place you can insert keywords. Just as you would optimize a landing page for an ad with keywords, you can also optimize the web page that launches the video. Including a summary of the video on that page will help optimize its content. You should also optimize the page's description in the HTML with keywords. And by all means, take advantage of any anchor text opportunities.
As I've already mentioned, because these are the kinds of things that many people still overlook for video, this part of the field is wide open. At SES Chicago, Gregory Markel of Infuse Creative observed that "Optimization of video for search is like optimizing your website for AltaVista in the late '90s." In short, it makes you a lot more visible to web surfers because not everyone is doing it yet, so with some straightforward optimization you can get good returns. This means you can set yourself up to rank for phrases like "travel video" or other broad keywords and hope to be spotted.
If you really want to make sure the search engines spot your videos, you can submit them. As John Leicht from Intuit pointed out, "The search engines themselves are very open to working with you. If you have good content, they are happy to help. Call them!" Top engines include Yahoo Video, YouTube.com, AOL Video, Google Video, and Singingfish.com. Blinkx and SearchForVideo are two other sites worth submitting videos to, and you can probably find more with a little research. All of the sites have helpful guidelines.
Next: Make it Easy to Get Spotted >>
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