Video Transcripts As Part Of Your SEO Strategy

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

Videos have become an extremely popular addition to web pages and much has been written about how to optimize them for search results. One little used option is to include a transcript of your video. As part of your SEO strategy you can submit the transcript to Google.

A thread on Cre8asiteforums discusses the use of transcripts. Google have a preference for including time stamping in the transcript. Those who participated in the thread doubted the user benefit of the time stamping, and for most users I tend to agree. I cannot see how time stamping can help with the videos indexing – since, from a search and SEO perspective; it is the content that is important.

One option that was mentioned in the thread included:

The transcript is actually a proper HTML page of text and still images (from the video) with the video offered as an alternative choice.

This makes more sense and, from a user perspective, is value adding. The user can see the contents of the video first, if it appears to answer their query, they can then watch the video. There is still a degree of dilemma in the search engine optimization world about videos and how best to optimize them. Providing a transcript in the form of a web page may be the better option. However, it is still the page that is being indexed, not the video.

Submitting the transcript to Google will at least have the content accurately indexed, even though it is a video. The only question left is whether or not you have the time to transcribe your videos.