If you’re attempting to improve search rankings for your web pages, these days it’s no longer an option not to optimize digital assets. With search engines incorporating video, images and news into standard search results, marketers have the opportunity to achieve increased visibility by implementing basic video SEO principles.
These 5 basic tips for video SEO are a good starting point for marketers looking to improve the “searchability” of their videos.
1. Optimize with keywords.
Just like any type of text-based content, video SEO involves optimizing with target relevant keywords — both for search engines and for user experience. Use keywords in:
- File name
- Title
- Tags
- URL
- Link text
Beyond that, include a paragraph of optimized text that provides a brief description of the video. Again, the benefits are twofold: You’ll improve the user experience and your search rankings.
2. Distribute videos on video-sharing sites.
In addition to posting videos on your own site, video-sharing sites are effective tools for gaining visibility and additional links. Remember these few points to maximize results:
- Don’t forget that videos hosted on YouTube and other video-sharing sites should be optimized for keywords
- YouTube channel pages — and those of other video-sharing sites — should be optimized, as well
- Use a video distribution service like TubeMogul to deploy your videos to the top sharing sites
3. Implement a linking strategy.
Video is judged by the same linking standards as all other forms of digital content. So building both internal and external links is crucial for video SEO. Ideas for a linking strategy include:
- Cross-linking to other videos
- Linking to videos from relevant web pages
- Linking to videos in blog posts
- Tweeting the video
- Linking to videos from social media pages
- Bookmarking the video
4. Encourage viewers to share your videos.
First thing is first — if you want users to share your videos, you must create content worth sharing. If your video isn’t interesting, relevant, entertaining or informative, users aren’t likely to share it, let alone view it. From there:
- Allow and encourage users to comment on the video
- Make it easy for users to share your video on You Tube, Twitter, Facebook and MySpace
- Offer video content in multiple formats so users can choose the one that best suited to their platform and connectivity speed
5. Re-purpose your videos.
As with text content, the more optimized video, the better. Get creative in order to re-purpose videos across the web:
- Embed videos in blog posts
- Break up long videos and create multiple shorter ones
- Use transcriptions of videos to create blog posts or content for web pages
- Take screen shots from videos and post them to Flickr and other image-sharing sites
- Turn offline content, such as training videos or videos of a conference keynote speech, into optimized digital assets for your website
What basic video SEO tips do you find useful?
Here are several other Video SEO posts you might find useful:
- Search Engine Watch: Optimizing Video for Search Engines
- ASK Enquiro: How Can I Optimize My Videos?
- Matt Cutts: optimize for search engines or users Google video
- More Matt Cutts: SEO Answers on Google Video
- Lancer Media: Optimize Videos For Search Engines
- Antezeta: 8 Ways to Optimize Video and Multimedia
- Search Marketing Standard: Optimizing Your Video Pages in 10 Easy Steps
- TopRank Blog: Optimizing for Video Search Engines
- Persona Non Gravy: Optimizing Video for Natural Search
- Reel SEO: Basic Tips for Optimizing Video content for Search Engines
- Aus SEO: Optimizing Video for Search Engines
- Rise Rep: Optimizing Video Content for Search Engines
Great run down of video optimization tips.
Another quick and easy thing to keep on your optimization radar would be the video's thumbnail. Testing and trying different thumbnail pictures can not only increase your video clickthrough rate, but also add an element of branding when your video appears on a Google search result.
Hey, Michelle. Thanks for providing valuable information about one of today's most sought after SEO platforms. This is one great resource all entrepreneurs who want to take their businesses to a whole new higher level will find really useful. Keep those articles coming!
interesting article
Hi there,
I think #1.Optimize with keywords is one of the useful SEO tips for an On Page Optimisation.
Thanks for this Michelle, it's good to read this info as it is easy to view 'video' in isolation, ie. you get too carried away generating the content and forget to optimise it!
Question – was it just me or was the link to TubeMogul not working?
Here's an idea… an idea that has a call to action. Offer your video as the number one reason for… cause of… or solution to… : Then encourage the viewer to contact you for the next couple of problems, solution or reasons you have to share. Bob
Michelle, thanks for the great post. Another idea is to actually take some of the text-based content from your site and basically “recreate” that as a short and sweet video and post it on your site. In this way, you may entice some of your site visitors who are not inclined to read every last word that you have out there, to actually click into a SHORT video, and get the message you are trying to convey. Remember, a certain percentage of your site visitors will NEVER read what you have posted, but WILL watch a video. I guess it's a laziness thing, but hey, if you can capture the attention of an extra 2-5% of your visitors, why not go for it. Video production/editing is cheap these days. Thanks again.
Great tip Dave. The reverse is also useful: transcribe audio from a video into text and use that to create additional blog content. Optimize it with keywords and cross link back to the video page will provide some SEO value.
Thanks. Valuable information to use. Besides dear fellows if you are looking for more targeted traffic click on my name to find out what I am offering. Thanks
Repurpose your video into a blog and strip out the audio to a podcast. Give each the same title which seems to help with search engine results.
Thank you for these tips. I use Tubemogul and that works great! I hadn't thought of taking a screen shot and putting it on Flickr. That's a very good idea and one I'm going to start implementing right now.
Marshall Wayne
Thanks for the tips! I think the main thing is to optimize the keywords so that you can get as many people directed to what you want to see even if they weren't searching for you. Also, it may just be an opinion but I think it is important to have content on a credible site in order to gain respect from the viewer.
Good tips thank you!
Great tips – I expecially like #5 and re-purposing content – if you've already got great ideas, why not put some extra thought into how you can spread it around again, just a little differently – totally useful for social media.
Thanks for these truly excellent tips. I think repurposing videos is an awesome ideas – I do the same for my content. It's always good to dig up the old refurbish it and do something new with it. It turns your video (and content) into a gift that just keeps on giving.
What an article about video Optimization,Nice post keep it up.
Thanks for the really good post and useful tips
businesses have been very competitive on the trend of video optmization. having a good content on the video itself is not enough. following the tips mentioned above will make our video marketing a success. thank you for the post Michelle.
I am going to post a video for my company, I will definitely follow all these video optimization tips.
Great article. As the number of broadband visitors are increasing over the internet, the necessity to video promote your business on different platforms is becoming obvious. This is the right time to step into right direction for promoting business with Videos. Thanks for sharing this.