Video Optimisation as Part of Search Engine Optimisation

The growth of video online has been explosive in the last 12 months, making it an essential add on to any web site content strategy or search engine optimisation project. Unsurprisingly, Google serves the bulk of video requests (YouTube reported 14.5 billion video views in the US alone in March of this year), with a massive 41% market share (compared to the 3% of its nearest rival). To tap into these phenomenal audience figures, you need to consider optimizing your site for video search inclusion. Here’s how:

1. Are Vidoes Relevant to Search Engine Optimisation Goals?

The cornerstone of any SEO-related activity is relevance. Your videos should be informative and impart useful information. Product demonstrations and how-to videos are the perfect low-cost solution. Any video uploaded to your site should fit neatly within your overall theme. Avoid videos that are too general, don’t relate to the rest of your site content, or are outdated. As with any content, video content must add value to your site.

2. Do You Have A Catchy Video Title?

How many times have you judged a book by its cover? Videos can suffer the same fate. If your title is uninspiring, you risk losing visitors before they’ve hit play. Think of your video title as the headline to that piece of content, and use it as a hook to get viewers to consume the content. As you’re optimizing for SEO, you must also consider your keywords and ensure that relevant phrases are included where possible.

3. Have You Used Search Engine Optimisation Keywords In Tags?

Appropriate tagging of videos is just as important as tagging of images and social media content. You can use tags on external sites such as YouTube to aid viewers searching for particular topics. Tags should be concise and accurate.

4. Are Your Video File Names Optimised?

If you’re going to host your video on your own site rather than upload to a third-party publisher, apply the same principles used in image optimization to your video filenames. Keep them short, in a human-readable format, and use keywords where possible.

5. Do You Have A Search Engine Optimisation-Friendly Transcript?

Text is still the stalwart of optimization, with search engine bots able to glean an enormous amount of information from the written word. When uploading video to your site, the use of accompanying text will aid your progress toward overall optimization goals.

Placing each video on its own page means you will be able to surround the video player with relevant text. In addition to a description of the video, consider adding a full video transcript. Although this may take some time to do, particularly if you have more than a handful of video files, the use of text will give the search engines enough data to index and rank your video.

6. Use Your Video For Link Building

Video content makes great link building fodder. When steps 1-5 are complete, start looking off-page to make additional use of your video content. You can use your video in blogs, link back to it from bookmarking sites, and submit it to RSS. When building links, the same mainstream rules apply – use descriptive anchor text and link directly to the page on the site hosting your video.

7. Go Viral

Along with using your video in social media communities, you can build additional interest by adopting a viral mindset. Allow users to rate the video on your own site and recommend to friends in order to generate peer to peer buzz. Viewers are attracted to videos that have good rankings or have received a vote of approval from their friends. If you decide to use this method to increase inbound links and number of views, make sure that your video is first branded to include your company logo, contact information, and website address.