Optimising for Video Search

May 17, 2008

Video search is getting bigger and bigger on the internet; this was realized by Google when they brought You Tube for a large amount of money. Google is not stupid it realizes that video search is going to be big business. In fact Google have been slowly incorporate video clips into their organic search results for the past few months. This change has pushed some text based optimised websites down the organic listings.

To help your business keep up with the ever changing search world you will need to create high quality optimised video content for your website. Video search optimisation is based on similar techniques to text based optimisation. Please find some tips below for optimising your videos

1. Place the video clip on a content rich optimised page - Search engine spiders still rely on the actual text placed on the page to discover what the video is about. Making the video page content rich and optimised will help Google understand what the video is about. You should also include the keywords in the URL, meta description and <H1> tags as usual.

2. File organisation - Keep the video pages in one separate folder off the root directory, this will help Google understand the location of your video clips.

3. Video Meta Data - You can actually add Meta data to the video during the encoding process., simply ensure that the video is encoded with a relevant title description and keywords. Focus mainly on the title as this holds the most weight.

4. Google Video Sitemaps - Google Webmaster tools now allows you to upload a sitemap for your videos, this helps Google get more videos into their organic search results. Just submit your video sitemap to Google through webmaster tools to inform Google of your video locations.

You will of course still need to obtain quality back links to the video page as you would with a normal content page.

Paul
SEO Project Manager