Though publishing and watching videos online has become a popular activity, the process of getting them ranked higher in search results still remains challenging. In fact, the task can be prove to be more frustrating than you may think primarily owing to the deluge of video content online. It is not just enough to produce great video content. What matters whether you correctly optimize and popularize it!
The top industry players have realized the importance of video SEO for greater visibility on the Web. Adding quality videos to your site is the perfect way to enhance web traffic to it. Videos are a great conversion tool, which can personalize your brand message and identity, helping to convert viewers into clients.
When you create a video, there’s no dearth of platforms to host it. YouTube remains the undisputed leader in the domain. There are other avenues, such as Blip.tv, Viddler, Vimeo, Metacafe etc. It is not necessary to host or build your own video player. You can leave the heavy bandwidth consuming tasks to these free to host sites rather than your in-house server.
As mentioned above, just as there is great competition among the hosting platforms, competition among quality videos, vying to draw the user attention is equally intense. Several little tweaks and tricks can be used to optimize a video Web page for an improved search ranking.
Have keywords embedded into title
Search engine robots understand actual text. They cannot decide the quality of your video by the content, judging largely by the links to it and other things around it, such as the title or tags. One key part of adding videos is to always have your important keywords embedded into its title. Also, adding a transcript will help top search engines recognize these keywords. In this way, your media content will further increase traffic to the desired Web pages.
Keep your title clear and descriptive
Ensure that the title is clear and descriptive. Include in it as many precise tags as you can. Many online users prefer to search for video content for sheer entertainment purpose. They may not be necessarily searching for something informative or educative. You should try a trick or two to draw their attention.
If you have created a compelling piece of visual content, try to think how these users would most likely find it. Generic tags like ‘funny video’ can be very handy. An accurate and user-friendly title is really very important because that’s exactly what your target audience probably will search online and land up on your site.
Encourage sharing of quality video content
Most publishers continue to be focused on getting links and traffic to their site, and not merely their YouTube page. In fact, experts underline the importance of placing video content on the site and submitting a video sitemap to top search engines.
Users, who share video content by embedding or linking to it in their own websites, can lead to increased traffic. A vital aspect of video SEO is getting other quality sites to link to yours.
Following these basic video SEO ideas will ensure that your Web pages get ranked higher over time.
