Regardless of how many backlinks you are able to point towards your websites, visitors and search engines simply won’t reward you with interest and higher rankings if your content is not worthy. Embedding video on a page is a great way to captivate a visitor, thereby keeping their attention longer and preventing them from returning to search engines to visit other websites (a statistic that Google and other search engines track as “Page Visit Time”). Logically speaking, if you can get a visitor to stay at your site longer, search engine algorithms will automatically assume that the lengthy visits are caused by informative, quality content on your pages. However, simply posting videos on your site will not give you the cutting edge needed to surpass the competition and rank highly with the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages). Here are some on-page video SEO tips for that. Have a read.
Optimizing for Video Search Sites
If you’re going to be embedding a video that you’re hosting on your own site (rather than using an embed code from a mega-video site like YouTube) you’ll want to optimize certain aspects of the file before you upload it to the server. This will give automated crawlers from video search sites like Truveo the ability to better index the content of your media and present it within their results. In addition to the file size and file name of the video these crawlers also look for associated HTML to determine the relevancy of a video’s content. Thus, it is important to give each video a keyword-containing title and meta-description. It’s also a good idea to write a brief description of the video to accommodate the page’s content below.
Submitting to RSS/MRSS Feeds and Video Sites
Another good way to target video sites and attract more viewers is to submit an RSS/MRSS feed of your website to a list of sites like Yahoo Video or Blinx. Learning how to create an RSS feed is easy, and once done it will keep search engines and video sites up-to-date about all of your content as soon as it is published. Perhaps the fastest way to attract views is to simply upload your video to a site like YouTube, Yahoo Video, or AOL video, and then use an embed code to place it on one of your pages. This will give you the advantage of being able to give your visitors a multimedia viewing experience that they’re familiar with, while also presenting the opportunity for them to click through to your YouTube channel simply by double-clicking the video itself. As always, if you’re going to be submitting videos or RSS feeds it is important to continue to optimize titles, descriptions, video categorization, associated content, and metadata. It may also be wise to include a full transcript of the video’s spoken content, particularly if it covers a trending topic.
Video Development and Publication Tips
Of course, the core content of the video itself is perhaps the most important aspect of optimizing the media for publication. Try to use videos that are between 5 to 10 minute long and effectively project the message you’re trying to get across. Even if you’re using the video to disseminate important information, try to incorporate some level of entertainment to keep viewers interested. This is a great on-page video SEO tips to follow. Building a few good thumbnails (screenshots) to be used on YouTube or your site’s menus is a good way to attract attention by pointing out some of the key moments in the video. Finally, if you’re not going to be uploading the video to YouTube or another video site it will be best to avoid flash players, as search engines are still not able to effectively index flash content.