Saturday, January 31, 2009

Ten Tips to Optimize Your Website Video Content

By Marcus Richard

We all have seen the research that has been pouring out all over the internet with regard to the growing popularity of online video content. Internet users are consuming online video content at a rate greater than previously predicted. And, consumers all over are learning to produce and share online video content. Video can often be a more effective means for a producer to get a message across than typical offline or online content. In order to take advantage of the opportunity that exists today with regard to online video, one must learn the tips and techniques that can be used to allow for greater discoverability of online content - this is called Video SEO or video search engine optimization.

1) In order to have your video more easily discovered, one very popular technique is to submit a text transcript along with your video for users and for the search engines to understand and index your video more easily. Use a keyword rich title for the transcript and be sure to include an introduction or summary that describes the video content in text form.

2) Keep in mind that when users search for videos on search engines, often time they use the word "video" in their search. For example, "car racing video." Therefore, in addition to the keywords that you are targeting, also be sure to include the word "video" or "videos" in your description, text, title, meta data, etc...

3) Off-page SEO, or, the techniques that one uses outside of the actual coding of the site itself (links, etc...), is just as effective for online video content as it is with any other webpage. Therefore, do your best to develop inbound links to your videos with the keywords that you are targeting in the anchor text of those links.

4) Create a video sitemap exclusively for your online video content so that engines can find all of your videos and understand the structure of your site more easily. This helps the web crawlers to locate your video files speedily and effortlessly.

5) When hosting video content on your own, keep in mind that flash is next to impossible for search engines to read and understand. Try to work with a format that is not flash. However, the simplest way to enable video on your site is via the popular flash players. That being said, do your best to take advantage of the other tips for SEO so that search engines can easily understand what it is your video is about.

6) Create search engine friendly keyword URLs for your video pages. To do this, you can use mod-rewrite function or htaccess file so that the URLs are freely assessable and readable by the search engines.

7) Various video search engines use to capture thumbnails of your in different manner. Some of them take the first frame of your video, while others try to take from the middle or end. It is better to experiment with each site individually to make sure they are displaying the right thumbnail for your video. A video thumbnail is always crucial when it comes to decide for a viewer which video to watch.

8) If you are hosting videos on your own site, use the sitemap that we mentioned earlier and keep your videos all in the same directory folder so that search engines can more easily locate all the videos you are publishing.

Beside the above mentioned points there are few more points relevant for the optimization:

9) Always make sure viewers are searching for your targeted keywords regularly. If not, try to find the closest related keywords being searched.

10) Viewers who offer feedback are most likely to take the desired action on your video. This could be a good opportunity for you to submit fresh content, if the most popular videos were included months ago, it really helps.

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1 comment:

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