10 Top Guidelines For Video Seo – Video Search Optimization

by Mark Robertson

All have heard about the on the web video phenomenon that’s hitting the internet. Viewers by the millions are going on the internet to upload and watch on the web video content each day. Often, videos are a more effective way to convey an advertiser’s message than typical offline advertising. And because video is becoming so mainstream, the cost to create on the internet video content is extremely low and affordable for nearly anyone. On the web video has seen big improvements in the past 2 years with regard to broadband connectivity, streaming, etc… Keeping in mind the vast popularity of online video as a method of world wide web marketing, it is important to learn the techniques most effective for optimizing your video for search engines.

1) All SEO specialists know that the search engines are built to index and rank text. Being that it is more difficult for the search engines to comprehend the content within a video (though they are working on it), it is a good idea to include as much text surrounding the video itself if possible. One excellent way to do this is to include a text transcript of your video alongside your video with keyword rich title and descriptions.

2) Keep in mind that when users search for videos on search engines, often time they use the word “video” in their search. For example, “car racing video.” Therefore, in addition to the keywords that you are targeting, also be sure to include the word “video” or “videos” in your description, text, title, meta data, etc…

3) Just as with normal techniques for SEO, it is just as important that you develop links to your video for off-page search engine optimization. Try to get as many quality links to your video as possible. Perhaps submit to social bookmarking sites and friend’s blogs.

4) Create a video sitemap exclusively for your online video content so that engines can find all of your videos and comprehend the structure of your site more easily. This helps the internet crawlers to locate your video files speedily and effortlessly.

5) If you’re hosting the video on your own site, it is advisable to do your ideal to utilize a player that is not flash as search engines have difficulty understanding flash content. That being said, it will be difficult to empower video on your site without a simiple flash player. If you can not get around it, do your ideal to take advantage of the other SEO techniques since search engines cant comprehend the flash technology.

6) Create search engine friendly keyword URLs for your video pages. To do this, you can use mod-rewrite function or htaccess file so that the URLs are freely assessable and readable by the search engines.

7) More than anything, I have learned that the thumbnail that you choose for your video is one of the most important factors in terms of the number of people that select to view your video. With that in mind, try to experiment with various thumbnails until you have a good idea which images attract the most views from the audience that you are targeting.

8) When hosting videos on your own site, keep your videos one per page and put all the pages with videos into one directory. This combined with a video sitemap will help search engines find and index all of your important videos.

Besides the tips mentioned above for Video SEO, there are a few other guidelines to keep in mind:

9) With any SEO that you do online, choose keywords that you know users are searching for. Use keyword research tools to discover keywords and phrases that are most often searched for when looking for the information that you are creating.

10) Enable ratings, reviews, comments, and feedback on your videos. Research shows that allowing users to provide feedback results in greater views for your video in addition to the fact that users who provide feedback tend to be those users that act.

About the Author:
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