How Video (If You Follow The Right Techniques) Can Help Your SEO Efforts
August 27 2010 by Randi Whittaker ~ 2 CommentsYou may be wondering why so many businesses are going to great lengths to include videos on corporate websites, social media networks and video hosting sites. Well, since Google integrated video into its universal search offering in 2007, websites featuring video have gained a significant SEO advantage. Today, more and more companies are now using online video to help boost their search engine rankings and drive more traffic to their websites by integrating relevant videos that match the content of their website.
With video becoming more dominant on the internet, video is likely to become more important moving forward in SEO. According to a Forrester Research study conducted last year, a page with video is 53 more times likely to show up on the first Google search engine results page (SERP) than traditional SEO techniques.
So what does this mean for you? Pages with video have a larger presence on the SERP. This means eye-catching content that in turn equals a better chance of getting clicked on, which should generally increase traffic, conversions and revenue. Also, distributing your videos to video sharing websites such as YouTube, Facebook and other social media networks, builds quality incoming one-way links which helps in your overall SEO ranking.
For those who have not already considered video as part of your SEO campaign, here are a few ways to ensure that your video content is playing its part in your overall SEO strategy.
- Create a unique title by adding your most important keywords.
- Submit a correctly formatted video sitemap. This allows you to give a better picture of the video to the search engines. Include relevant keywords within the anchor text of all links to the videos that are featured in your video sitemap. For video that is hosted on your own website, use of a video sitemap on your site will help to filter page rank as well as direct search engines where to index your content.
- Create a video library on your site; this way Google knows where to find your video content.
- Use relevant keywords in your Metadata to optimize your video. Include a keyword rich description of the video within the meta descriptions.
- Tag your videos with key phrases that are most reflective of your content.
- Include “video” as a keyword on a regular basis throughout any metadata, as many user searches include the word and it will increase your chances of showing up on those queries.
- Create a YouTube Channel. Each video you post to your channel can be tagged and indexed, increasing the odds your brand name will appear in natural searches for keywords associated with your business.
- Post your video link on Facebook and Twitter. Use your link as a “video reply” to videos on similar topics. Increasing the number of links back to your video is a great way to boost your search results.
Overall, online videos are a way to educate your customers, increase brand identification, generate traffic to your website and ultimately drive sales your way if optimized correctly.
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