SEO For Video May Become Redundant

Writing by Nick Stamoulis ShareThis

One of the hardest areas to optimize from an SEO perspective are images and videos. The ALT function does help to provide data for the search engines, however the data can be easily gamed – and has been.

You can tell the search engines, through the ALT tag, what the video is all about. However, search engines cannot read a video too confirm that data, it is all taken on trust. You can tell the search engines that the video is all about coffee when in fact the video is a short music clip. Images suffer from the same fate. Whilst it’s not widespread, there are some SEO’s that will misuse the ALT tags in this way.

There appears to be a new search engine in the making that can ‘read’ a video, frame by frame, to try and determine its content. Using this information it is said to return results far more relevant than any other existing video search. Called ‘VideoSurf‘, it is still in closed beta (invitation only). Those who have had the opportunity to use it have been impressed.

Consensus so far places this search tool in the impressive basket – so impressive it has also been placed in the acquisition basket. Yahoo! and MSN would jump at the opportunity of adding it to their arsenal – it would continue their competitiveness in the face of Google’s continual rise in popularity. Google would also like to get their hands on it, as much to thwart the other two as anything else. From and SEO perspective, this could be considered either good news or bad news.

Good news for those that have difficulty optimizing their videos. The search engine would effectively do it for you. It would be bad news for those who use videos that are only partially related to the pages content. This could have a bigger downside to your search engine optimization if Google takes over the technology.

Of course, on a positive note, if your video does cover more than one area, which is hard to optimize through the ALT tag, the search engine could do it for you so your video will appear in more than one set of search results. In that instance, it could be great news for your SEO efforts.