Video SEO Tips

SEO Best Practices for Video Optimization

Why use video for search engine optimization?

We all know that Google is the number one search engine. But do you know what search engine is in second place?

If you consider YouTube as a search engine (which it is), then it would be the second most heavily used search engine. More searches are done on YouTube than on Yahoo, Bing, Ask, and AOL combined.

By the way, YouTube is owned by Google. Google had acquired YouTube in November 2006 for $1.65 billion. That's why you see YouTube video results in Google's search result page.

More videos are uploaded onto YouTube in 60 days than what was created in 60 years by the three major U.S. television networks.

And more videos are to come. With the adoption of HTML 5 and its new "video" tag, you can have a web page plays video directly with a simple tag such as ...

<video src="myVideo.mp4" controls preload="auto"></video>

The latest version of all modern browsers now supports this new video tag: Internet Explorer 9, Firefox 5.0, Chrome, Safari, and Opera.

Mobile phones not only play video, but they can easily capture video. Ubiquitous smart phones along with small hand held flip video recorders enable just about anyone to shoot video.

In short, video is going to inundate the web.

To get the most traffic to your site, optimize your page for Google. And optimize and market your video for YouTube. Basically use your Video SEO To Jump To The Top Of Google Search Results.

We say "market your video" because getting your video to a wider audience on YouTube requires a bit of marketing strategy. YouTube after all is kind-of also a social network. You can "friend" other YouTube members, post comments and video comments, rate videos, share, and so on. As such, you have to participate in this YouTube social community. As you post comments and rate videos, you will be exposed to more and more people.

As you acquire more friends and acquire more subscribers to your YouTube channel, more and more people well view your videos that you have uploaded. More and more people will comment on, mark as favorite, rate, share and embed your videos. These statistics will influence how YouTube ranks your videos in its search results. For example, the more comments on your video, the better. The more "likes" of your video, the better. The more your video is "embedded" into other websites, the better it is ranked. And so on.

Video Search Engine Optimization

Aside from being "social" on YouTube, there are a few other ways to optimize your video for search.

  1. When you load your video to YouTube, you have the ability to compose your title, tags, and description with relevant keywords - just as you would when you are optimizing web pages.
  2. Add closed caption to your video. This involves you typing up a transcript of your video into a text file which you upload to YouTube and associate with your video. YouTube cannot actually "watch" your video. But it is able to read your transcript file. So having such a file will clue YouTube as to what your video is about.
  3. If you are targeting your videos to a specific geographic area, make sure you add in your geographical location of your video.
  4. Use tags containing your important keywords that describes the video.
  5. Also before uploading your video file, you might want to consider renaming the video file with some keywords in the file name. Some people suspect that this might have some relevancy in how YouTube searches for video.

Now that you got people to watch your video, what you want is for viewers of your videos to come to your website. So make sure in your video, you market your website. In YouTube, you can add an annotation at the beginning or end of the video to display your website name. Alternatively, you can add a banner text at the beginning or end of your video that gives you website name.

We hope this will give you a better idea as to why and how to perform video SEO.

Video Marketing Tips

  • Submit your videos to top video sharing sites such as
    • YouTube
    • Metacafe
    • Break
    • Google Video
    • Dailymotion
    • Yahoo! Video
    • Revver
    • Vimeo
    • vidiLife
    • Stickam
  • User watermarks, Include website url.
  • Allow visitors to embed your video on their websites/blogs.
  • Include Social Bookmarking Links beside or below your video.
  • Enable Comments.
  • Allow users to subscribe to your videos via RSS/MRSS.