Video Search Engine Optimisation (VSEO) - tips and strategies

(VSEO) - Video Search Engine Optimisation

by Caroline Rodgers


The use of video’s to promote your online content is becoming more and more important, and prevalent, in the expanding world of search engine optimisation.

We should be seeing a big boost in VSEO (Video Search Engine Optimisation) in 2009.

With the growth of video portals such as You Tube (www.youtube.com) and multi-submission sites such as Tube Mogul (www.tubemogul.com), it has never been easier to get your videos on the web. So why should you try and go down the root of selling VSEO to your customers? What is its selling power? Is there more to it that popping your video up on You Tube and hoping for the best? Or do you need to provide your customer with a full blown media centre?

Why use Video SEO?

1. Video on independent websites seem to be quickly and heavily indexed and ranked by the major search engines.

2. Including videos adds additional ways to optimise for your keywords and phrases. By adding content relevant to your keywords and phrases, combined with the related videos, will add weight to your site and its content.

3. The video content can be duplicated on 3rd party website such as you tube without any duplicate content penalties.

4. Allows for more text and pages to optimise your keywords and phrases around. Be sure to surround videos with relevant on-page content.

5. Embedding videos in your site pages is a great way to increase the stickiness factor of your pages, which can increase both traffic and search rankings for a specific page. Google and most search engines use a variety of factors to determine the ranking importance a specific page online, one of which is average visitor session length on a page.

* Visitor length on a page can be increased by embedding a video. These longer site visits may be interpreted by Google that the page has increased value and in turn may be given a bump that translates into higher search engine rankings.

6. Choosing a video that is themed to your content and informative can help with the stickiness factor – you need to give the search engines something to crawl. Adding an irrelevant video for the sake of adding a video will just confuse your visitors.

7. Videos help in adding new, fresh and dynamic content to the site.

8. It is important get your video content found by the search engines. This can be achieved through the use of sitemaps, RSS and MRSS (Media RSS) feeds.

Google has introduced Video Sitemaps that will index the video content. If video files are named correctly this is valuable to the search engines. Click here to see Google tips on creating and adding a video sitemap: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/topic.py?topic=10079

9. Videos are now listed in the search engine results pages adding valuable links and alternative sources to your brand name and web site.

Tips for implementing Video SEO

A) File Names - Give the video file a catchy and relevant name that is related to your keyword or phrase. Once you have uploaded your video sitemap there is added opportunity for these keywords and phrases to be found and indexed by the search engines.

B) Meta Data - Add meta data to your video files. Again, use relevant meta data, like you would when you are carrying out other Search engine optimisation campaigns.

C) Transcripts - Transcripts of the video will add credible content to the page and give the spiders relevant information to crawl. The transcript should make reference to keywords, relevant content and your brand.

D) Outbound Linking - If you add video content to other sites such as You Tube, make sure that you avail of their ability to link back to your own site.

E) Video Length - Add shorter videos to keep your audience interested. If your video is quite lengthy, consider breaking it down into smaller chunks. This will also give more quality video content to optimise.

F) Branding – Have your branding displayed in your video to enhance your brand awareness.

G) Inbound Linking – link your videos to important keywords throughout your site to enhance their value.

H) Rating – allow users / visitors to rate your video

What can you provide to your customer to boost your sales and in turn boost their rankings?

The first step is getting your client to see the value in undertaking Video Search Engine Optimisation.

Using the information supplied in this document you should be able to present a fairly strong case to your client.

You will also need to provide them with a viable strategy that will get their rankings up. For a simple solution, you can offer to add content to video sites, implementing the tips outlined above.

Another option is to provide them with a video library on their site that will have separate pages for the individual videos. This will allow you to add valuable content and meta data, plus the ability to link to these pages from within your site.

An excellent article by Caroline Rodgers,Biznet IIS. Caroline Rodgers, SEO Executive, Biznet IIS.


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