Video SEO From Blue Fly Web Marketing

Written by Robert Weil (Blue Fly Web Marketing)

When most people think about video SEO, they think about getting their video out there. We are going to take a slightly different spin. We believe video can help you with your SEO efforts in 2 ways:

1) Google likes sites that have video

2) if/when you get videos into the search results, your organic listing in the search results will stand out…

People’s eyes will be drawn to the video link. That means more real estate in Search Engine Results and increases click-through rate.

• Make sure your video title, description tags are keyword friendly and save video file name and URL in keyword friendly manner. For example, if you are trying to optimize for “How to install a dishwasher”, then make that the title of your video and write a description using “How to install a dishwasher” fairly early in the description.
• For each video, when you submit your sitemap you will submit a thumbnail image to Google. This tells them what still image to show in the search results. Be sure to consider an image which you think may be compelling for users to click on as this will increase your click-through rate.
• Make sure to submit a video sitemap to Google. There are video sitemap generation tools available.
  When you place video on your site, put it on a page which is also well optimized for your keywords (meta title, description, keywords, body content, etc). Click here to see some tips from the SEO experts at Blue Fly Web Marketing. Then try getting a few strong links into that page to get noticed by Google.
• If you want people to watch the video on your site, we generally think you should host the video through a video hosting company. Look into good video hosting companies like Wistia. If you host on YouTube, there are advantages, but when people click on your video from the search results, they will in almost all cases go to YouTube instead of to your site.
• Lastly, consider using a video transcription service. Search engines cannot “read” video- that is why your title and description tags are so important, but they CAN read it if you transcribe it and put the transcription underneath. In addition, your site visitors will appreciate being able to either watch a video or read the transcription as different people have different preferences for processing information.

If you follow these few steps above, we think you are at a nice advantage. Video SEO is fairly new so there is less competition and we think it is a good way to help you stand out in Search Engine Results.