Grow Sales, Inc. - Helpful eTip Series

December 2011

Three Ways to Optimize Video Content for Search Engines

To call online video "ubiquitous" is an understatement. As of late 2011, 20 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute.

With so much video competing for viewer attention, how can you help ensure the right people find yours? Enter search-engine optimization (SEO).

Your video content should own top Google results for the search words and phrases relevant to your business.

When prospects are searching the web for terms related to your business, your video content should be among the first results they see. Because video content is 53 times more likely than traditional web pages to receive a first-page search-engine ranking, a good opportunity exists for businesses that make just a few SEO-boosting tweaks to their videos.

Read on to discover GSI's easy-to-implement tips for optimizing your video content for search engines.

Include A Text Transcript
The "crawlers" that Google and other search engines use to discover and index web content can't read a video and determine its content as they can with text. For this reason, the actual content of videos - as opposed to their title, description, and keywords - often ends up being invisible to search engines.

Fortunately, there's an easy way around this problem. Including written transcripts of your video's content when you upload it will help search engines comprehend your video content, index it appropriately and include it in search results. YouTube also makes it easy to place captions throughout your video so that each segment of your video can be found in search. We recommend using a site called CaptionTube that allows you to easily add captions along with your videos when you upload them to YouTube.

Create A Video Site Map
Creating a video site map on your website is another good way to ensure search engines can find and index video content you host there.

Sitemaps are SEO-boosters - they tell search engines about your site's pages and increase each page's chance of being indexed. A video sitemap is used specifically to identify and tag videos on your site. Traditional webpage content is usually worth indexing in a sitemap. Your website's video content must be indexed on a separate sitemap. Otherwise, search engines will be unable to include your video directly in relevant search results.

Make sure your video sitemap includes at least these three things:

Your video file
A thumbnail image of the video
Description and title information

Choose Your Video's Title Wisely
Your video's title heavily influences its ranking in Google and other search-engines. Search engines give a video's title much more weight than its description and keywords.

Our recommendations for creating an SEO-friendly video title are similar to our recommendations for SEO-friendly webpage titles. Be descriptive, and use words you think your prospects would be searching for that are also relevant to the video's content. Resist the tendency to cram numerous keywords into a title - Google penalizes videos for this practice.

What Can Grow Sales Do for You?
Charting a course for aggressive, intelligent growth can be difficult. Grow Sales, Inc., has been helping companies handle their growing pains with ease since 1996. We can optimize your video and website content for search engines as part of our web/graphic design solution. We also offer marketing, public relations, social media and sales support services. Think of us as your outsourced sales growth department. With our help, 2012 could be a banner year for you and your company.