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.
Because online video is so popular right now, it presents a unique opportunity for online marketers to leverage video content as an effective means for marketing brands, products, and services. Because online video marketing is in the nascent stages, there is much that is not well understood. For content producers as well as Internet marketers, it is important to learn how to produce and publish video content in a way that users can easily discover your video content on the search engines. For this, one must learn and understand
video search engine optimization, or SEO for video content.
To start off, let's answer the simple question, "
What is Video SEO, or SEO for Video?" Basically, it is the process of creating and publishing a video such that it is easily discovered, indexed, and ranked by search engines. When we talk about video SEO, there are really 2 distinct strategies and methods to consider.
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.
With posted video SEO, it is important that you pay close attention to the keywords that you include in fields entered upon upload like the title, tags, descriptions, etc... We recommend utilizing tools and services that help you to automatically upload your videos to multiple video sharing sites at once. Although it is not impossible to do so, the major downfall with this strategy falls into place when your goal is purely to drive traffic back to your website.
If your goal is to generate traffic back to your website, then you may want optimize video content on your own website. The strategy of optimizing video content on your own website is commonly referred to as
"hosted" video SEO, or website video SEO. Because universal search is growing across the major search engines, an opportunity exists for website owners to leverage video content to rank well within both video search engines as well as the major search engines like Google and Yahoo.
For "hosted" video SEO strategy, it is most crucial that you consider it a holistic approach to website optimization and follow general best practices for optimizing website content. That being said, because search engines can not yet understand the content within a video, it is most important that you optimize your pages utilizing on-page text that is relevant to your video content. There are many tips and techniques for "hosted" video SEO.
The following tips are crucial:
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) Let users share and link to your video in order to increase the off-page linking to your video pages.
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.
Good luck and happy optimization. Get on board with Video SEO today.
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