How to SEO Your Videos
With billions of users flocking to video sharing sites for their news, information, and community needs, video has largely replaced text content as king of the web. While the increasing popularity of video and diminishing popularity of text content may seem like a glum outlook for the search engine marketer, there is no reason it should be. Users are still finding videos the same way they find articles – search.
Although video obviously does not lend itself well to in-text search engine optimization, it does provide you with ample space to help targeted users find your video and stretch your content further than you would be able to with text articles. While re-using the same article on many different sites does not help you get better rankings and may actually hurt you – you can use the same video on numerous sites at the same time. You can even use the same video with many different titles on different sites, all based on your keywords.
As with text SEO, it all starts with the title tag. If you are putting up the video on your business website (and you should), you have all the room you need to work with. You can choose the full title, build a whole text entry around it optimized with keywords in your heading tags and text. If you are also uploading the video on various sharing sites (and you should) you can use your keywords in the title tag as well.
While on your own site you can upload up video along with text, video sharing sites will limit you to short descriptions of your video. This is where you can use another keyword or two and to make it easier for users t find it on search engines.
Video sharing sites will also let you include tags. This may or may not help you with SEO but it will make it easier for users looking for content in your niche to find it. Use these tags wisely to target your specific audience.
Off-page SEO for videos also works the same fashion as in text. Backlinks from SEO optimized anchor text, other backlinks, and traffic all help your video rank higher. Good traffic numbers will also make your video rank higher when people search for your video on the sharing sites.
Promote your video through social networks. Put the video out there on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, and any other site you can think of. Better yet, try to get a conversation started about your video using Twitter or one of the other networks.
Ultimately, video SEO is just like article SEO except with less actual on-page SEO. You are utilizing off-page SEO more but you are still focusing on the title tags and descriptions. Keyword selection is also a little different. You will need to consider how people search for videos, particularly what phrases they add on to the keywords, as opposed to looking for simple web search results.
This article has been contributed by Arjun Khanna. Arjun works for Offshore Ally, a leading company of talented virtual assistants and link builders online. He enjoys travel and photography. Connect with him via Twitter.