Optimizing Video for the Web

Recently, a client asked us to post a video we produced for them on their website. Posting the video was pretty easy to do. But simply embedding a video on a page doesn’t guarantee your audience will find it. In fact, every minute 35 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube alone! With so much video content competing for viewer’s attention, it’s more important than ever to develop marketing strategies for your web video content and one strategy to consider is video SEO.

Video content is not searchable due to the fact that search engine robots only understand text. However, the content surrounding the video is including the title, description and tags. As with any other search engine optimization process, video SEO involves identifying keywords and phrases viewers would use to search for your video and then building those terms into the surrounding content. Something as simple as inserting keywords into the filename of your video would put you ahead of 80% of Internet marketers according to Forrester Research.

Video SEO Basics
The website ReelSEO provides several basic tips for optimizing web video. Their list includes:

• Use social bookmarking tools that will help in the visibility of the videos.
• Keeping your video content at one place off the root directory helps in providing easy access to search engine crawlers.
• RSS and MRSS feeds
• Tag videos with specific keywords, even if it means tagging each scene.
• Position your trademark logo in the video.
• Train editors to think like video searchers
• Encode for the ride keywords
• Use keywords in filename
• One video per URL
• Add tagging
• Surround video with on page relevant text
• Crosslink to videos using keywords in anchor text
• Create an optimized video site map
• Upload videos to search engines
• Add informative Meta data
• Allow video files to be embedded and include a logo

Not to toot our own horn, but we apply many of these SEO best practices to the videos featured in the work section of this site including tagging, description, keywords in the file name, related text on the page, related content linking to the page, social media bookmarking, and so on.

Is Video Becoming Searchable?
There are also some exciting new tools being developed to try to overcome the challenges of searching video content. YouTube gives users the ability to place captions on video. A transcript can be attached to the video’s timeline allowing the text to be searched and indexed. While this is an exciting development, I’m still waiting for the day when Google figures out a methodology for searching the audio and visual content itself.

If You Produce It They May Come, But You Can Help
Obviously, any SEO choices you make should be based on the marketing goals of your project, and the needs and interests of your audience. But with 11 billion hours of video being viewed online each month, it makes sense to advantage of every appropriate tool at your disposal in order to distinguish your web video project from all the others.