Are Search Engines and Users Seeing What You See?

With YouTube reporting a 25% increase in online video views over an eight month period, video is an amazing tool to educate and expand your audience, drive traffic to your site and increase sales.  The key is having unique content and understanding how to manage optimization for that content.  Optimizing your video content and making it visible will help you rank with search engines and users alike.    

Make it catchy! Unlike written content, search engines cannot scan your video for keywords.  Be smart about the title and description of your video and include the most important keywords in both.  Also, associate text with your video in the form of a transcript.  This will help to unlock the full content of your video giving search engines and video sites a better idea of what it is all about.

Keep their attention and keep them engaged! Video content should be unique and under 10 minutes - or even better five.  You don’t want visitors to get bored and tune out before they hear the key message.  If your content is longer than 10 minutes, break it into segments.  This will not only help keep their attention and keep them engaged, it will provide you with that many more videos to optimize, tag and drive traffic to.

Find your video the right home. Depending on the intent of your video, to maximize views or drive traffic, consider where you want it to live. If you are looking for mass exposure a 3^rd party hosting site is the best bet. You may even want to consider uploading your video to a mass sharing site that will then upload it to several video sharing sites at once.  On the other hand, if you are trying to increase traffic directly to your site, then your site is the best place.  Make sure to include video in your sitemap.  This gives you a better chance of being indexed, making it easier for search engines to include your video directly in related search results.

Did you see that? Whether you are looking for max views or increasing traffic to your site, a video is meant to be viewed. Make it easy to share by posting links on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.  Let and even encourage visitors to comment on your video or rate it.  Promote your video by emailing a link to employees, family, and friends and ask them to share further.  Increasing the number of hits your video gets will in turn increase its ranking.