Video is the most effective form of multi-media since it combines audio, visuals and motion to make a high impact. A business that includes videos in its web marketing techniques can easily engage a large number of viewers.
Google is now encouraging blended results, which means videos have a much higher likelihood of making it to top rankings than simple web pages. Although video is so effective not many business owners are taking complete advantage of it yet; the competition is not as high for video SEO initiatives as with text content.
The use of videos is much more than their creation and uploading. Here are the ways to effectively use videos in improving traffic to your website and getting top rankings.
Where to Upload Videos
YouTube has almost become a search engine and is the best place to upload videos for maximum viewing. Moreover, all videos placed here get indexed by Google. After uploading video content on YouTube, embed it onto your own website. Google’s ranking algorithm uses the number of views that videos get in both places to decide video rankings.
SEO-Friendly Keywords in Titles, Transcripts and Tags
It is not enough to have excellent video content and put it in the right places. For Google algorithms to understand the content quickly, the video must be substantiated with appropriate text, both on YouTube and your business website.
SEO rules are common to video and other forms of web content. First, you need to select appropriate and effective keywords that users are most likely to enter in search strings; a little research on competitor sites can help.
Make your video title SEO-friendly and preferably include “video” in it, since users often enter this word in the search string. Do not keep it too generic and your webpage is likely to rank high on search engines.
Next, add a text description as an introduction to what the video is all about. You also need a transcript of your video content. Manually creating the transcript is a time-consuming task, but tools like SpeechPad make it an easy job.
If these descriptions, transcripts and tags are not on the same page as the video, it’s useless for SEO purposes. The best and most effective layout is having the description above the related video and the transcript positioned beneath it, both for the YouTube video and the embedded version on your business website.
Submit a Video SiteMap to Google
Besides videos, animated PowerPoint presentations, slide shows and screen captures also work equally well for SEO. Google is not able to read this Flash content while making indexing decisions. To ensure it works for SEO, you need to submit a video sitemap to Google, the format of which is explained on their Webmaster Tools site.
Backlinks
Even if your YouTube video starts getting top rankings, it won’t automatically drive web traffic to your website. Publicize the URL of the embedded video on your website by creating backlinks on the comments section of popular blogs and in social media networks like Facebook and Twitter.
Backlinks take time to improve your page rankings, so be patient. It must be noted that backlinks on poor-quality pages or too many backlinks created all at once can work negatively, since it appears as spam to Google’s algorithms.
Create a YouTube Channel
Create a dedicated YouTube Channel; choose a name that represents your industry and even contains your chosen keywords. It is a bit of an investment, but you get the advantage of auto-play banners and the ability to evaluate the performance of your channel and that of individual videos using YouTube Analytics.
YouTube videos have a much higher probability of making it to the top of the rankings as compared to individual website content. YouTube has now started rewarding videos being actually watched; not just their links being clicked on.
The duration that viewers play the videos is counted, so the solution is to create videos with engaging content. This YouTube video needs to be backlinked to your website to allow it to compete in rankings with well-established sites that have been using SEO tactics for a long time.
