Ten Quick Tips about Video SEO
It has been estimated that more than hundred hours of footage is uploaded to YouTube every minute! So the question is, how do you make your content stand out amongst millions of videos you have to compete? How do you get people to view YOUR video?
Here’s the solution – SEO – Search Engine Optimization!! With this comes another question, what is SEO? SEO is a powerful web marketing technique that helps search engine find and rank your video higher than the millions of other videos in response to a search query, thus gaining more and more traffic to your channel.
The first basic truth you must know about SEO is that search engines are not humans! Search engines are text-driven, unlike humans. Although technology advances rapidly, search engines are not those creatures who see the beauty of a great design or enjoy the voice and movement in videos.
Here are ten quick tips you need to know to make your video more relevant in the technical eyes of search engines.
- Keywords Research
It’s all about the words typed into a search box!!
Keyword research is one of the most important, valuable, and high return activities in the search marketing field. By researching the keyword demand of your video, you not only learn which terms and phrases to target with Search Engine Optimization, but you also learn more about your users as a whole.
Tag your video with the relevant keywords and phrases. You need to give your videos the best chance of being found because no matter how good the video is, if people can’t find it then it’s as good as useless.
- Meta Data – Be Smart And Relevant!!
When referred to “metadata” concerning any video, we’re talking about all the textual information that accompanies that video and helps search engines better understand the content as well as helps users find any video on the internet. As an example – In the YouTube world, during the publishing of your video, one must take care of the appropriate keywords, tags, titles, descriptions, and even annotations. All of that “metadata” assists search engines in serving your video as a relevant result when a user types in specific words.
- Create Custom Thumbnails for Your Video
If your account is verified, you must be having the ability to upload custom thumbnails for your video uploads. Your custom thumbnail image must be as large as possible, for the image will also be used as the preview image in that embedded player. It should be attractive enough to make your user view that video, but at the same time it should not misguide the user – “Call to action” factor!!
- Better Video Distribution on Online-Sharing Sites & Social Media
You obviously want to add the video to your website to gain visibility, but don’t forget – It is extremely important to publish your video on other online sharing sites such as Vimeo and Youtube. Share the video on Facebook, tweet about it on tweeter and add bookmarks – Generate more and more traffic to the video!!
- User-Friendly Video Resource Center
You have invested money and time both in creating your video content; ensure you don’t provide a poor experience of the video when someone tries to view that content. You should start by grouping your videos in a user-friendly video resource center where visitors can quickly and easily search across your content. Make it easy for all your visitors to find what they’re looking for by creating categories and tagging those categories properly, so it’s easy for them to navigate between videos and find what they’re searching.
- Enable Feedback, Ratings, Comments, and Reviews
By allowing users to give feedback, your video will have greater views as not only will they feel they contributed to your business, but also those who provide feedback are usually the ones to take action. Make sure you reply and monitor all the comments – Community engagement is important!!
- Implement a Great Linking Strategy
In all other forms of digital content, a video’s landing page is judged by the same linking standards. You must build internal and external links including cross-linking to other videos, linking to videos from relevant web pages, linking to videos from social media pages, bookmarking the video, etc. Also, when it comes to cross-linking, think about quality, not quantity! A single, authoritative, good link can do a lot more for you than a dozen of poor quality links, which can annoy the user.
- Create Video Sitemaps
Sitemaps are fundamental in SEO because they help search bots and people locate and navigate to content assets. To get higher SEO value, have a dedicated landing page created for all videos listed on the video sitemap. If you upload a video on your website, making and providing a sitemap for that video will make it more easy for search engines to find and index your video. Creating a video Sitemap is something that anyone can do using any number of video Sitemap generators and Google Webmaster Tools.
- Continuous Analytics Check
Is your video as successful as it should be? Are you monitoring your traffic, page views and goals to ensure your channel becomes a driving force of revenue? Checking analytics on regular basis is an important activity!!
Ultimately, Google wants to satisfy its users and to do this; it will rank sites that supply a high-quality user experience. That is where the use of analytics takes part in the game. Google already tracks a multitude of metrics on your website. They don’t track this data without any reason and they use these metrics to analyze and determine the quality of the experience the website provides to its users. Therefore, if Google deems your user experience to be poor, guess what!? Your search engine rankings will be too!!
10. Monitor, Measure, and Evaluate!
Optimization is a continuous process. Implement a tracking system to your video website to keep track of the traffic and conversions happening on different channels. It helps you understand the performance of your video SEO strategy and also provide insight into viewer demographics – Monitor them; analyze them, and use the results to improve SEO for higher traffic and conversions.
