To the top with Video Search
Today I had a great conversation with one of my local SEO clients about the Video SEO . We are currently working a pretty aggressive SEO campaign for him and I asked if he would be open to taking some video of what exactly he does on a daily basis. He asked me if it would help him hit higher rankings for his keyword search terms. My response was absolutely, Google’s search and indexing algorithms continue to evolve in complexity, but one thing will always remain, and that is that Google loves video content. Google has given more and more of its search results real estate to “blended” search results, displaying videos and images towards the top of the first page, and pushing down traditional web results that would have otherwise competed for top rankings.
However there are two different ways of going about Video SEO.
1. Upload your video to YouTube.
The advantage of this is that Google owns YouTube and you can guarantee that your video will get index rather quickly, however this will not guarantee you’ll get a first-page result, but at least it ensures that Google knows your content exists.
The drawback, of course, is that anyone who clicks on a YouTube result will be taken to YouTube and not your website or directed link. This might be fine if what your after is straight up branding, but if your looking for traffic, I wouldn't consider this to be a successful strategy.
The other alternative is:
2. Optimizing the Video for proper Search Engine Indexing
Video SEO is a set of techniques designed to make sure that:
§ Google finds your video content
§ Google successfully indexes your video content
§ Google will display your video content when specific keywords are entered as search terms
This method is great for creating traffic to a particular URL.
Here’s how to make it work:
You Need Video Content
It doesn’t really matter what is in the video, as Google could really careless. You could use actual video from a smart phone, power point slide show, animated content, it really doesn’t matter at all. Google isn’t looking at what is in the video (Yet), so what is important is the title and other meta-data to determine what content your video actually contains.
Submission, Not Discovery
You will want to submit your video to Google using a Video Sitemap. This is similar to an XML sitemap, but is formatted specifically for video, and only contains information about your video content. It is submitted using Google’s Webmaster Tools.
Next you will need a robots.txt file for all video pages, this will ensure Google can verify that the locations on the Web do in fact exist and that you are real and contain proper embedded codes that indicate the presence of a video.
Title and Title Tags
Google primarily considers the match between search keywords and the video title. Google will give stronger weight for all videos that proper titles and Meta tags.
Once this is done you will see that the search engine will pick up your video and it will get ranked pretty quickly and start dominating for that keyword.
However there are two different ways of going about Video SEO.
1. Upload your video to YouTube.
The advantage of this is that Google owns YouTube and you can guarantee that your video will get index rather quickly, however this will not guarantee you’ll get a first-page result, but at least it ensures that Google knows your content exists.
The drawback, of course, is that anyone who clicks on a YouTube result will be taken to YouTube and not your website or directed link. This might be fine if what your after is straight up branding, but if your looking for traffic, I wouldn't consider this to be a successful strategy.
The other alternative is:
2. Optimizing the Video for proper Search Engine Indexing
Video SEO is a set of techniques designed to make sure that:
§ Google finds your video content
§ Google successfully indexes your video content
§ Google will display your video content when specific keywords are entered as search terms
This method is great for creating traffic to a particular URL.
Here’s how to make it work:
You Need Video Content
It doesn’t really matter what is in the video, as Google could really careless. You could use actual video from a smart phone, power point slide show, animated content, it really doesn’t matter at all. Google isn’t looking at what is in the video (Yet), so what is important is the title and other meta-data to determine what content your video actually contains.
Submission, Not Discovery
You will want to submit your video to Google using a Video Sitemap. This is similar to an XML sitemap, but is formatted specifically for video, and only contains information about your video content. It is submitted using Google’s Webmaster Tools.
Next you will need a robots.txt file for all video pages, this will ensure Google can verify that the locations on the Web do in fact exist and that you are real and contain proper embedded codes that indicate the presence of a video.
Title and Title Tags
Google primarily considers the match between search keywords and the video title. Google will give stronger weight for all videos that proper titles and Meta tags.
Once this is done you will see that the search engine will pick up your video and it will get ranked pretty quickly and start dominating for that keyword.
RSS Feed