More and more videos are finding their way to the web everyday; on business sites, personal websites, video hosting sites, mobile devices, social networks, blogs, and even cell phones. And the trend will continue for the foreseeable future. Search engines now include videos and their content in their search algorithms for local search. This is leaving businesses searching for a strategy to create and optimize videos. Here are some key points to help the search engines find your videos and maximize your rankings.
- Create informative, unique and relevant videos. Don’t create videos that are irrelevant or have little or nothing to do with your service, product or brand. These will just cause confusion with your audience. The more relevant your message, the more likely it will be effective. The more relevant, the more likely your video will perform well in video and universal search results.
- Get to the point; keep videos less than 5 minutes. Most users watch videos 3 minutes in length or less. If you must do a video longer than 5 minutes in length to get your message across, break it up into smaller videos and make sure to tag them accordingly. This will help increase the likelihood of users watching your video without getting bored. After all, it doesn’t matter how great your video is if no one watches it.
- Create a video sitemap on your website. If you host videos on your own website, create a video sitemap on your site. This will help direct search engines where to index your content. Use relevant keywords within the anchor text for all links to the videos that are featured in your video sitemap.
- Creating in-video text. In order to get your video to rank well, you need to provide the search engines with textual content that is relevant. Video search engines are beginning to rely on image, object, speech, and text recognition technologies and in the near future it be more important to focus on in-video content. But currently it’s more effective to focus on textual content surrounding a video with relevant textual content (on-page) as well as related links, related information, etc.
- Optimize your video for important keywords and key phrases. Optimize your video for words and phrases that users are likely to be searching for. Be specific, relevant, and focused. Consider naming the file name of the video with these terms in mind. As video continues to grow and as more and more users utilize video search to find online video content, longer tail search terms will become more and more effective.
Some specific keyword and key phrase points to follow:
- Descriptive Meta Data - Use relevant keywords in your metadata to optimize your video. Include a keyword rich description of the video within the Meta descriptions.
- Video Title - Make sure that you use the relevant keywords in your title as this is likely the first thing that the search engines will use to identify your video. Also try using a catchy or unique title that will not only give attention to your video but convey your theme, product, or brand.
- Tags – Be sure to tag your videos with keywords and key phrases that reflect the content of the video.
