Search Engine Optimization For Internet Videos
Jan 10th, 2009 | By James Lewin | Category: General, Internet TV, Streaming Video, VideoWould you like to know a simple way to make your Internet videos rank higher than 80% of all the videos published?
Research firm Forrester has taken a look at the state of search engine optimization of Internet videos, and have found that less than 20% of marketers insert keywords into the filenames of the videos on their site, and even fewer use more advanced tactics like writing keyword-rich captions and annotations, or creating online video libraries.
“If you’re not optimizing your videos, you should start,” says Forrester’s Nate Elliot. “Optimizing video content to take advantage of blended search is by far the easiest way to get a first-page organic ranking on Google.”
Here are the steps that Forrester recommends:
- Insert keywords into your video filenames.
- Host your videos on YouTube, and embed those YouTube videos into your own site. Google says its algorithms consider how many times a video is viewed, and any views embedded videos receive on your own site get added to the ‘views’ tally on YouTube. (And yes, nearly every video we saw Google blend into its results came from YouTube.)
- Optimize your YouTube videos by writing keywords into your videos’ titles, descriptions, and tags.
- Embed videos into relevant text pages on your site. The context provided by the text on those pages (which is hopefully already optimized for search as well) will help the search engines figure out what your videos are about.
- Also create a video library on your site, so Google knows where to find your video content. (Google Video Sitemaps can help with this too.) Write keyword-rich annotations for each video in the library.
In addition to the suggestions Forrester offers, you should consider using keywords related to your video within the video itself. Some search engines are beginning to index the audio of your videos – so including your keywords in your script may help you optimize your videos for future search engine technology.Â
Got other ideas for search engine optimization of Internet media? Leave a comment!
Image: Steve Garfield
I have several exclusive videos on my site that I want to keep as my own brand, mainly because they are local and will speak directly to our target audience. These things are videos that pertain locally to our town and events such as local high school reunions. To maximize their exposure I created my own video sitemap for each local video a couple of weeks ago. Google as accepted them as a valid sitemap, so it will be interesting to see how well the search engines pick up a “home grown” solution and blend it with our thumbs.
What I have seen is that any of our video content ranks high on the search engine in the categories that I’m trying to win, which are categories focused on our town and local area. It’s apparent that Google knows their search users are attracted to the video content once it’s made available to them.
Stunning comment about SEO. I’m honestly incredibly astonished that that has not really been articulated earlier to such a great length.