Video Optimization Techniques to Consider
You’ve decided that now is the time to start including videos on your website. Good for you. To be sure, it is the perfect time. And it’s never too late to get started. But how do you optimize your videos?
Here are three specific methods for video optimization that you should use when implementing your on-site video marketing campaign:
- Keyword-rich file name: This is one of the most important video optimization techniques for any website. Don’t just name your video something generic like video1 or video-of-me-and-billy. Instead, give your video a keyword-rich file name. For example, if you sell chocolate truffles on your website and you are adding a video of your manufacturing process, give your video a name like the-chocolate-truffle-making-process.wav. This is a keyword optimize file name that will give you a big search engine optimziation boost in the search engines.
- Include a text description: Unlike image optimization, videos don’t use alt tags. However, you can use a text description below or beside the video to give it an additional SEO boost. The description should be 2-3 sentences. And you should use your keyword a couple of times in the description to ensure that the search engines understand what the video is about. For instance, for the chocolate truffle video above, you might say something like “United Chocolate Truffles, Inc. spends 4 hours on each box of chocolate truffles in the manufacturing process. The video above shows our chocolate truffle team at Station 2 (the mixing station) adding our special ingredient, a trade secret that makes our chocolate truffles 30% richer.” Make your video descriptions keyword rich.
- Include a share button: If you allow your site visitors an opportunity to share your video with others on their favorite social networks or send the video by e-mail to a friend you’ll increase your traffic to that page dramatically. Increased traffic can lead to higher search engine rankings, particularly if you have a low bounce rate (and if people are watching your video you’ll have a low bounce rate).
Video optimization is not rocket science, but there are some specific techniques that will boost your SEO efforts. These three video optimization techniques are some of the most important that you should know.
8 Responses to “Video Optimization Techniques to Consider”
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Good post Nick and after having been doing Video SEO for nearly two years it is clear that simply putting up a keyword-optimized video is not enough to gain top Google organic links for your desired keywords, even in a geo-targeted situation. Meaning ‘plumbers Pittsburgh’ and so on. It takes a lot of background work to ‘promote’ your video such as getting loyal customers to comment positively on your video and share it as you mentioned, assuming you are putting on third-party video sites such as YouTube. You also have to be able to pick keyword terms where you can ‘win’, meaning get onto Page 1 of Google, and lots more . . . thx TT
Hi Tim,
Thanks for reading and your comment…video optimization is still in its early stages, but over time this will be an area of growth for our industry for sure!
Thanks again!
Nick
Hi,
A client recently asked me whether you get better rankings from hosting the site on their own website or hosting it with a third party – youtube etc. I believe you get better ranking when its with a third party as opposed to hosting the flv wmv or mov on your own site. Do you know of any evidence to back that up?
Thanks
Scott
Hi Scott,
Thanks for reading and your comment. To answer your question, I have always seen videos hosted on You Tube rank much better. I think the search engines might value the tagging, description, title, comments and overall search engine trust of a site like You Tube since it is so huge. Not to mention Google owns them
Some great tips for those that are new to video marketing!
Another thing to consider is your video’s thumbnail. The thumbnail is what entices a viewer to click/watch and gives a subtle hint at the quality of the video. On the flip site, having a boring or confusing thumbnail can negatively impact the number of views you get.
Hi vidiSEO,
Excellent point and nice addition about a video’s thumnail…very true!
Hi Nick
Great post as always. Video SEO is often made to sound so automatic and simple by the “gurus” touting their products. Blast out a video and voila, there you are king of the SERPS. They leave out some details!
Seems to me that as video proliferates online, video seo will change drastically. Right now, I think a lot of people would be amazed at how little the engines actually read about a video and how if the video travels out of the website it is hosted in (You Tube or where ever) that the title and keywords etc. do not travel with it. They still have a long way to go before they can actually read the video or audio portion of the file.
In my experience, a video on You Tube is going to do much better than a video ion your own individual server because You Tube itself has such authority. There is a lot to learn here and a lot will change.
Hi Lorraine,
Thanks for reading, your comment and support!
Excellent points about video SEO, it is medium that has and continues to evolve, great point about YouTube and its authority…