Top 10 Tips for Video Search Optimization

Posted on September 30, 2008 @ 3:37 pm

People usually love video, millions of Americans consume videos online and same is the case world over. A consumer is most likely to keep in mind and refer to a video in comparison to a print advertisement. These days video making is very economical as compared to the cost of a traditional commercial. Broadband is getting enormous popularity worldwide. Now people can watch videos without long download times or quality issues. Present generation considers video to be a reliable source of news and information. Online video for them is second to nature. Here are a few tips/hints for optimizing your video:

1) In order to have your video more easily discovered, one very popular technique is to submit a text transcript along with your video for users and for the search engines to understand and index your video more easily. Use a keyword rich title for the transcript and be sure to include an introduction or summary that describes the video content in text form.

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) It is advisable to create a separate sitemap just for your videos in your site and try to keep your video files in one directory this would help the web crawlers to locate your video files speedily and effortlessly.

5) If you are hosting the video on your own site, it is advisable to do your best 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 simple flash player. If you can not get around it, do your best to take advantage of the other SEO techniques since search engines cant understand 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) Various video search engines use to capture thumbnails of your in different manner. Some of them take the first frame of your video, while others try to take from the middle or end. It is better to experiment with each site individually to make sure they are displaying the right thumbnail for your video. A video thumbnail is always crucial when it comes to decide for a viewer which video to watch.
8) If you are hosting videos on your own site, use the sitemap that we mentioned earlier and keep your videos all in the same directory folder so that search engines can more easily locate all the videos you are publishing.

In addition to the specific optimization techniques listed above, make sure that you also follow some common guidelines for online video content:

9) Keyword research, as with search engine optimization for other online content, is crucial for targeting the audience you desire most effectively. Use keyword research tools available in order to identify those words that most often are searched for when searching for related content online.

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.

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