Optimising videos for search

As bandwidth limitations are becoming less restrictive, online video is increasingly becoming more popular, leading to a rapidly growing use of user-generated content sites such as YouTube. Google is also now including videos within their ‘universal’ search results, so that optimisation of videos to achieve high rankings and site visits is now vital. So how can your business take advantage of this potential new advertising channel?

SEO techniques for videos can help to ensure that a company’s video content attracts as much search traffic as possible, either from within sites like YouTube or as part of a general search that can drive traffic to a website or video. Of course, a business needs a compelling reason to produce and submit a video, such as for a product demonstration, a training guide or a graphic example of what the company can achieve, but this can increasingly be used as a good method of attracting web traffic and new enquiries.

The optimisation of video content can depend on the type of objectives required ‘ such as using a ‘Monetised Video’, such as those used by professional video content publishers to directly generate revenue from a site, where the video itself needs to be protected and stored solely on your own site, or a Promotional Video, which is commonly used as a method of stimulating interest in a product or service and which can be placed in as many online locations as possible.

It is necessary to optimise for both first generation video search engines (older & similar to standard web search engines that rely entirely on metadata for indexing, such as AltaVista & Ask) and second generation ones (which not only spider textual metadata, but also extract meaning from the video itself, such as Blinx and Podzinger).? Therefore there are 3 different scenarios for video optimisation which need to cater for video search engines that crawl your site; for video sites that accept RSS or MRSS (Media RSS) feeds; or for video upload sites (such as YouTube).

Some of the main factors that should be considered for all these forms of video search optimisation are as follows:

• use appropriate keywords in the filename and URL
• optimise the title and description tags used in the video file, where possible, and on the page hosting the video file (such as when listing a video on YouTube)
• consider the surrounding text content and description on the page around the video
• link to the video from other web pages and locations with the appropriate keyword content in the text link.

In addition to these basic principles, the video should be submitted to the appropriate video hosting sites, directories and search engines ‘ Google now offers a video sitemap option within their Webmaster Tools. In addition, the file should be provided in as many formats as possible to extend access. It is also recommended to offer a textual transcript of the audio and video content as well as publicising these multimedia files with appropriate RSS/MRSS feeds.

If you already have business videos available or want to consider using this medium to attract search traffic, please contact us now to find out more.

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