Everyone knows that online video is the fastest growing online medium. As of Oct. 2008, not only is it popular, but on the major 5 search engines,video has now passed search as the most popular online activity, according to research released by comScore and covered by ReelSEO.
Online video, combined with search, is one of the most effective ways to drive internet users to your videos and market your products and services. However, being that online video marketing is such a new strategy, there are still many aspects of video marketing that are not well understood. For online marketers and video content producers, it is important to learn and practice techniques that increase the likelihood that internet users will discover their content via the major search engines. To do this, one must understand video search optimization, also known as video SEO.
In order to leverage the power of online video with search, one must first answer the question, “what is video SEO, or video search engine optimization?” Simply stated, it is the art and process of creating online video content in such a way that it is easily discovered and indexed by search engines. Doing this will help to drive maximum exposure to your video content. When we talk about video SEO, there are really 2 separate and distinct strategies for optimizing video online.
One strategy for video SEO is that which we call “Posted” video SEO. Essentially, this is when you optimize video content that is uploaded to video websites like Youtube and Yahoo. With “Posted” video SEO, the strategy is to generate as many views as possible for your videos. Uploading your video to these sites allows you to draw upon the massive audience of viewers that these sites already have. In addition, because these websites have a pre-existing authority and page rank with the search engines, this is an effective strategy to leverage these sites to obtain rankings within organic and universal search.
When optimizing your video for uploading (”posted” video SEO), it is very important that you choose your target keywords wisely and include these in your titles, descriptions, tags, comments, etc… There are also many services available on the web that allow you to upload your videos to multiple video sharing websites at once. Although there are a few tactics that can help, for the most part, a “posted” strategy does not assist well with driving traffic back to your own website.
In addition to “Posted” video search optimization, there are many techniques and strategies for “hosted” video SEO, or “website” video SEO. With this, the goal is to optimize video content that is placed on your own website. With universal search on the rise, it is possible to utilize video content to increase your own website’s chances of ranking in the major search engines as well as the video search engines. The main benefit in this strategy is that you can expose potential viewers to your other business assets, products and services.
With “hosted” video SEO, it is most important that you follow best practices in general for search engine optimization. Because search engines can not yet read within video content, it is important that you optimize the HTML pages that contain your video content much in the same way that you would with regular SEO. Although there are many detailed tips and techniques for “hosted” video SEO, most can be summed up with the following tips:
1) When including video on a web page, make certain that you populate the page with relevant on-page text.
2) Consider publishing a transcript or captions for your video.
3) Keep your videos in one main directory with one video per unique URL.
4) Create and submit a video sitemap to guide the search engines to your video content.
5) Be sure to generate off-site links to your video pages by encouraging users to share and link to your videos.
Whatever strategy you utilize for optimizing your video content, ReelSEO has a ton of expert tips, guidelines, tutorials, and information for both “posted” and “hosted” video SEO. In addition, ReelSEO is the only website out there today that is 100% focused on video search engine optimization and online video marketing. If you want to learn about online video marketing, ReelSEO is the most authoritative source out there.
Take advantage of online video marketing and video SEO. Good luck to you and your efforts.
Tags: No Comments
0 responses so far ↓
There are no comments yet...Kick things off by filling out the form below.