All have heard about the online video phenomenon that is hitting the internet. Viewers by the millions are going online to upload and watch online video content each day. Often, videos are a more effective way to convey an advertiser's message than typical offline advertising. And because video is becoming so mainstream, the cost to create online video content is extremely low and affordable for almost anyone. Online video has seen massive improvements in the past 2 years with regard to broadband connectivity, streaming, etc... Keeping in mind the vast popularity of online video as a method of internet marketing, it is important to learn the techniques most effective for optimizing your video for search engines.
1) In order to have your video more easily discovered, one very popular technique is to submit a text transcript along with your video for users and for the search engines to understand and index your video more easily. Use a keyword rich title for the transcript and be sure to include an introduction or summary that describes the video content in text form.
2) Don't forget to encode the keywords you are targeting into your video. Try to use the word "video" as much as possible, make sure the word "video" is used in your title, description, meta data etc.
3) Just as with normal techniques for SEO, it is just as important that you develop links to your video for off-page search engine optimization. Try to get as many quality links to your video as possible. Perhaps submit to social bookmarking sites and friend's blogs.
4) Video sitemaps are a great way for you to tell the search engines where all of your video content resides. With video sitemaps, you make it much easier for search engines to discover and index your online video in a rapid manner.
5) If you are hosting the video on your own site, it is advisable to do your best to utilize a player that is not flash as search engines have difficulty understanding flash content. That being said, it will be difficult to empower video on your site without a simple flash player. If you can not get around it, do your best to take advantage of the other SEO techniques since search engines cant understand the flash technology.
6) Create search engine friendly keyword URLs for your video pages. To do this, you can use mod-rewrite function or htaccess file so that the URLs are freely assessable and readable by the search engines.
7) The first thing that users see when browsing for or searching for videos is the video thumbnail. Research shows that the thumbnail you choose for your video can really effect the number of viewers that watch the video itself. Try to experiment with the thumbnails that you choose to see which ones create more interest and get seen more often by viewers.
8) When hosting videos on your own site, keep your videos one per page and put all the pages with videos into one directory. This combined with a video sitemap will help search engines find and index all of your important videos.
Besides the tips mentioned above for Video SEO, there are a few other guidelines to keep in mind:
9) Always make sure viewers are searching for your targeted keywords regularly. If not, try to find the closest related keywords being searched.
10) Allow users to submit comments and feedback on your videos. Studies show that viewers who offer feedback are those most likely to convert and take the desired action that you are trying to solicit, whether it be an email, website visit, or purchase.
About the Author:
This post was provided by ReelSEO, the ultimate resource for Video SEO and Video Marketing. For more tips on video SEO visit ReelSEO.
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