Now that fast internet connections are readily available to many of us, more and more people are searching for videos when they do a search on the web.
Search engines can’t watch and index videos that way (yet!) so it’s important to follow good SEO practices on your video pages.
To get you started, here are 5 top tips to help your videos get found on search.
1. Give your video a good title
As with your titles and headings in your page copy, don’t try to be clever. And use something descriptive that tells search engines and your users what your video is about.
2. Provide a text transcript of your video
A text transcript will get indexed by search engines in the way normal page html copy does. And it’ll allow your users to access the content if they don’t have video software or no means of listening to the video.
3. Use the word ‘video’
It sounds obvious by make sure you mention ‘video’ in the title tag and main page html copy, and host it in a ‘video section’ on your site – you can embed it on other parts of your site. For example, if you want to insert it in an article or feature it on your home page.
4. Give your video file a descriptive filename
For example, ‘How-to-optimise-video-for-search.flv’ not ‘video1.flv’.
5. Tell video search engines about your content
The tips above will work well for plain old ‘web searches’. But if you want your videos to show on the SERPs for video search engines like Google Videos, Yahoo Video Search or Blinkx you’ll have to tell them about your video content.
The way to do this differs between the engines. But it usually involves submitting an RSS feed (like on Blinkx) or video sitemap (like on Google Video).
Getting your videos indexed in these engines, especially Google Video, can also push your videos onto the SERPs for ‘web searches’ along with image results and news. Even if the searcher doesn’t mention the word ‘video’ in their search term.
Tom Hallett
Campaign Delivery Manager
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