Video Search Engine Optimization: Tips & Techniques to Increase Views and Sharing

 

Online video has emerged as a powerful tool for marketing, PR and consumer education (exceeded only by its entertainment value in portraying amusing cats).

As the amount of online video grows exponentially, the popularity of video becomes both an opportunity and a challenge for marketing and PR. The challenge is to get your video noticed and shared.

Video search engine optimization (vSEO) is the most effective tool to attract viewers/likes/shares and to push videos higher in search engine results on Google, Bing, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.

The most important thing to understand about vSEO is that search engines don’t search or index the actual content of the video. The existing search engines don’t “see” video or “hear” audio. They can only capture and index text. Descriptive text, then, is the key to effective SEO for videos – and podcasts too.

Original content that entertains and educates is the first must-have for a successful online video. Your marketing and PR videos are competing for attention against many other videos on the same subject – not to mention those darn cats. Eye-catching, entertaining, emotionally-involving and interesting original content wins out. In other words, content that the viewer values most succeeds best. Viewers rarely value hard-sell content.

But even a spectacular video may not succeed without effective vSEO. That’s the second essential for a successful video: well-written text describing the video content. By properly optimizing marketing and PR videos with text descriptions, you give the video a level of SEO juice equivalent to or exceeding the highest-ranked written content. That description must highlight carefully-selected keywords and phrases that consumers use to search the topic. The vSEO description must be attached to the video on every website or social network where wherever the video appears.

Key Components of Video SEO

Focusing on the following proven techniques will help you successfully optimize your videos for search engines.

Keywords. Selecting effective keywords or key phrases is even more important for video than it is for blog posts or other web content. If you haven’t already, research how keywords that describe your video rank in search engines. Ideally, the selected keywords will rank well in all the search engines, including Google, YouTube and Bing. It may be necessary to include multiple keywords and phrases to appeal to differing search engine algorithms.

Tags. Keywords in the video description help search engines categorize the video. Think about what words your target audience might use and use those terms as tags. Tags don’t have to appear in the video content – but keep in mind that search engines penalize misuse of keywords aimed at gaining higher ranking.

The title. Including the top keyword in the title is probably the most important vSEO tactic. Experts also recommend placing the most important key word or phrase at the start of the title or as close to the beginning as possible. This is no place for being clever and burying the meaning of the content. Search engines are machines that lack any appreciation for wit, irony or sarcasm. Including common keywords such as “how to,” “about,” and “review” can help.

A transcript. When uploading a video to a website or social media network, including a transcript of the audio content along with a description of the video elements gives search engines the content they need to index and rank the video. Transcribing a video into text can be a fair amount of work, but it’s well worth the effort for its additional SEO value. You’ll gain a competitive advantage because many others won’t take the time to transcribe their videos. The transcription can also serve as a resource for other social media activities. You can highlight quotes or sentences, convert the video into blog post, convert key points into tweets, and transform sections into social media posts. Additionally, you can add captions for people with hearing issues and people speaking different languages. Although that won’t boost the SEO, it will make it accessible to a wider audience.

Likes/Shares. Whenever possible, include buttons that enable the viewer to like or share the video. Any type of endorsement by viewers drives more views. This is especially true on social media networks. A large and increasing number of likes/shares also prompts the social network’s algorithm to distribute the video more widely in news feeds.

A sitemap. A sitemap on your corporate or brand website tells search engines where to find the video on your website, making it more likely that search engines will find and index the video, and send traffic to the video. You can also upload the sitemap to your YouTube channel to help send viewers from the YouTube channel to your website. Uploading a sitemap is somewhat complicated, but following the guidelines and sitemap protocol will ensure you do it correctly.

Bottom Line: Effective vSEO increases search engine rankings and greatly amplifies the impact of videos for marketing and PR. Well-chosen keywords and carefully-crafted descriptions of the video content are essential to achieve higher search rankings. Including transcripts of the video and sitemaps provide more data that search engines can use to index and rank the video. Utilizing the proven techniques to optimize your videos for search engines will improve rankings, increase views, and help your video rise above the proliferating number of online videos.

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