IMPROVE YOUR SEO WITH VIDEO
You may have heard about the benefit of web video as it relates to SEO, and have watched other business owners use a marketing video to successfully increase their exposure online. Now, you want to understand more how take advantage of web video for yourself.
To do this you must understand how a website marketing video affects search engine rankings, how to go about creating your own video, how to optimize your video deployment, and finally what to do when you have successfully accomplished the above. In this simple informational guide, you will learn everything necessary to join the thousands of businesses who are allowing well optimized web video work for them.
The power of website video with SEO
A website video is a powerful tool that can quickly educate your audience by cutting through the clutter. It can give you the credibility you need, grant you an edge over your competition, and when used properly, boost your rankings in the major search engines. As of late there is a new trend in search engines called blended search. This involves search engines displaying videos, news stories, maps, images and other data relevant to traditional search queries. Domains with different types of relevant data are seemingly given higher rankings over sites with just traditional text content alone. For the purpose of this article we will focus on adding video to help with your rankings and search engine optimization by taking advantage of blended search and it’s benefits.
So how exactly does using video affect search engine rankings
Top search engines are always on the search for fresh content. Google and other top search engines index new videos immediately, as opposed to text and images alone which can go weeks before being crawled by search “spiders”. This creates a huge advantage for video content providers, and has created potential for formerly under-optimized pages to shoot to the first initial pages of search engine results.
With Google’s search results now giving more weight to “blended” search results, and other following suit, websites with video can reach first page rankings more easily than before. Now is the time to get started.
The basics of adding video
To get your online video presence started you will need a relevant marketing video produced and a method in which to get your video noticed by the search engines. These action items can be done very quickly without losing a great deal of time or money.
Make a “Relevant” Web Video
Your video content is only as good as it’s relevancy. Web users are searching for solutions to problems or answers to questions. It’s not enough to just make a video about how great your company is, or just highlighting your incredible services. You must provide answers to user searches by first researching what your potential audience is talking about. Scan social media sites, conduct your own polls, assess your own website visitors to find out what their needs are. Through this research you can then create video content relevant to their needs. Your videos will be found faster and linked to many times more than self promoting videos alone.
You may hire one of the many website video production companies online to produce your video professionally. After creating quality, relevant content, you are then able to effectively brand, promote or sell within that content.
Post Your Web Video online
There are many ways you can post your web video online and be found by search engines. The most popular method is using video sharing services such as YouTube. These services allow keyword data and full descriptions to be added to your posting, as well as embedding options for your website, sharing with friends, commenting and even multiple-device playback for tablets and cell phones.
You may also upload your video directly to your website, and use any number of video players to embed the video into your web page. In this approach you control the look of the video more accurately, as well as resolution and multiple formats you make available to your visitors.
There is no harm in providing multiple formats for your users, or posting your video content to multiple online services. Remember: the more places you post your video, the more exposure you receive.
Optimize for indexing
There are 3 steps recommended to successfully optimize your web video content for search engine discovery, regardless of where you place your video.
When using a video upload site:
Enter information such as keywords, title and description all rich in keywords and commonly searched terms. This information is very useful in helping search engines determine the relevancy of a particular video as it relates to user searches.
Be sure to link the video back to related videos and site text content.
It is a good practice to also provide a full text transcript as well, allowing plenty of text content for Google and other search engines to use in indexing.
When Self-hosting
Creating a Video Sitemap is also beneficial for crawler discovery. Video search engines will crawl your site looking for video. When this happens, be sure that you have provided a summary, description, tags, and keywords so that your video is successfully indexed.
Simple HTML text and descriptive titles, keywords, meta description and on page text content should appear near the embedded video and describe the video present. The more keyword rich your web page is the more successful your efforts will be.
Keep all video files in a single directory for easier discovery by site crawlers.
Publicize your video everywhere
Ok, so you’ve created a quality, well produced video and optimized it according to the steps above, now what? Exposuring your video through many mediums is what separate the successful from the unsuccessful. Keep in mind the following tips and be sure that your Web video is seen!
Publicize multimedia files with RSS and MRSS feeds.
Social media and social bookmarking sites can increase views to your Web video exponentially, use them.
Enable embedding options so that others who find your video useful can embed them in their sites.
End all videos with a sharing option, the most powerful tool in marketing word of mouth.
By following our easy, how-to guide on creating well optimized Web video, your business will be in a better position to brand, sell, and increase traffic to your Web site.
