The Whys and Hows of Video Search Optimization - Best Video SEO Practices
(Page 3 of 4 )
Your best practices for video search optimization are mostly the same as your standard best practices for SEO – as long as you keep in mind that search engines can’t see video content. Yes, Google says that they can see Flash now, but if you read their blog entry on the subject, you will find this sentence: "Also note that we do not index FLV files, such as the videos that play on YouTube, because these files contain no text elements." So it looks like you're going to have to worry about optimizing your videos for a while longer.
Some sites are trying to make things easier for both the search engines and companies with video content. EveryZing, for instance, provides its “ezSEO” service and voice recognition technology developed by BBN to help web sites index large amounts of archived and legacy video and audio content. But what if you can’t afford to hire someone else?
First, as I mentioned, you need to decide who you want to pick up your video. Every site has its own specifications as far as what video format it accepts. Then you need to make your video visible to them. That starts by using the right keywords. That’s right – the key to video search optimization is wrapping your “invisible” video in a layer of very visible text. Have you ever wondered why you so often find videos embedded in blog entries that talk about the video? It’s because the text of the blog gives the video a natural layer that makes it visible.
As to the video formats themselves, I’m not going into any serious detail here; the technicalities of video production are beyond the scope of this article. You can cover your bases by offering three different video formats when posting video to a web page: Flash, Windows Media file and QuickTime. When you submit video files to search engines and sharing sites, you should use the MPEG 4 format. If you’re planning to submit your video clips to multiple video search engines and social medial networks, you might consider using Tubemogul.com.
Video clips should receive their own page; do NOT put more than one video clip on a page. Use all your usual on-page optimization techniques – keywords in the content, keywords in the file name separated by dashes, keywords in the page titles and meta tag description, keywords in the H1 heading…you get the idea. Don’t keyword stuff so much as use them intelligently and let them fall naturally.
As to off-page optimization, link building becomes even more important. Search engines can’t read your keywords directly from your video, so links become an important way to tell them what keywords are relevant. The good news is that video has a better chance of going viral and collecting lots of links. You can encourage this by making it easy for your visitors to save your video’s URL to social media websites. Include Digg, del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, maybe even Yahoo Buzz. Don’t forget to include buttons that let your users send a link to their friends! “Learn more” buttons can help make your page even more sticky.
Next: Special Tips for Video SEO >>
More Search Optimization Articles
More By Terri Wells
