If the 20th century was about language and written text, the 21st
is going to be about video. Today’s youth read less, and watch more than their parents dreamed of, and this is already showing it’s influence on the web today. With videos incorporated into search results, and webmasters seeing powerful increases in engagement and sales through the use of good videos, it’s a medium that can’t be ignored by those of us working on the web.
Ranking your video so that it shows up in the top results is another matter however. Here are some Barefoot SEO tips for getting a video into that coveted top spot.
Tips for SEO’ing your Videos
(a) Check your video is indexed. Google your domain name and then click the ‘Videos’ tab down the left toolbar and you’ll see which ones show up. If it hasn’t been indexed, build some links to to it or social bookmark it until it does. Submitting a video sitemap inside Webmaster tools can also help.
(b) Check out the competition – With most video rankings given to You Tube you may want to ask yourself at this stage whether you’ve got a chance of outranking such a high authority domain or if you should simply host the video on You Tube and rank it there. Pros and cons to that but worth thinking about.
(c) The page the video is posted on must have perfect onpage SEO in its own right and a good amount of content: 500 words plus but the more the merrier.
(d) Seomoz points out G’s emerging use of ‘keyword intent.’ It might help to include certain words such as ‘demo’, ‘tutorial’ or ‘video’ in your video title, thus indicating to the powers that be that you’re offering something of value. If SEOmoz is right, and they usually are, this will help you rank…
(e) Page Placement – Only have one video per page, and place it near the top. The video should also incorporate descriptive text, title, captions, and other information to help make your video stand out.
(f) Thumbnail – Make G’s job easy for them by including a thumbnail for the video in your video sitemap. Google’s guidelines says at least 160×90 and up to 1920×1080. Make sure it’s unique, and will encourage visitors to click through if you do gain that coveted top spot!
