Video: Can You Use a Bit of SEO?
Did you know that approximately 20 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every MINUTE? Think about it… That’s a LOT of video. Talk about breaking the Web, eh? If anything can do it, video can. But that’s highly doubtful. And video is becoming the most popular form of surfing. From ten to ninety-seven, everyone seems to really love YouTube. When there’s nothing to do, or when you’re in a bad mood, finding some hilarious stuff on the site certainly changes your daily picture.
Remember, Americans love TV, and YouTube and video sites like it, have definitely changed the way we see the Web.
But how do you optimize video for search? Spiders can’t parse video yet, right? So, what can you do?
It’s basically the same as it would be for any web page. Have a KILLER title and description. That’s number one. Your title can be based on something that already gets a lot of views on YouTube or something you make up, but it should definitely have a keyword in it that people are searching for. And the title shouldn’t be too long. Remember that Google only shows 65 characters in your SERPs listing, so keeping your video title to 65 characters or less is a good rule of thumb.
And with the description, remember that you can actually type anything you want to into YouTube. There’s no character or word limit, so be sure to create a killer description with a keyword in every paragraph, if possible. You don’t want your description to be unreadable. Always put readers first, no matter what type of content you’re creating, but putting keywords into your video description will certainly help the search bots to know what it’s about and what page it’s connected to.
Something else that you should remember about the description is that the URL to whatever page you want traffic to should go first. Because hyperlinks automatically turn blue in a browser, that’s a direct link that people can’t miss to your page. Even if they don’t open the window to see the whole description, they’ll see your URL immediately and it will be clickable. Cool?
OK, then extend the process. Put your URL between every paragraph, too. Make sure that people know where to find you after watching your awesome video.
Be sure to create some accurate tags for your video, too. Use keywords to entice bots and viewers. But remember that tags are category labels, not really keywords. So, if you want to use a person’s name, unless they’re well-known on the Web or in real life, then it’s probably a useless tag, for example. But if the person is someone that people search for, using that name isn’t such a bad idea. Be sure to do some keywords ranking analysis (keyword research by a very fancy name) and see how many people search for that name in Google every month, if you’re unsure.
You can also add a caption track by uploading a transcript to your video. This was put in place to help handicapped people to enjoy your videos, but it also allows in YouTube to add segments of your video’s transcript to the timeline, making it searchable, too.
There are lots of features on YouTube that most folks just don’t know about, and they can really boost your SEO. Check them out and be sure that when you’re putting video online, you’re getting all of the SEO benefit that you can.
