The basics of video SEO

It sounds quite scary and complicated. But it doesn’t have to be so intimidating. Lets give some clarity on the subject.

So where does video fit into the SEO mix? Well, the biggest impact is that videos themselves can show up in search results in the form of rich snippets. Google gives a lot of credit to video. That’s because they’re harder to make than text articles. They’re more information dense. And there’s not that many people making them yet. So when they see a page with a video on it, they give it more credit, and it ranks higher.

Research from Forrester showed that it was 50 times easier to end up on the front page of search results when you’re using video. That’s why video SEO is important. It’s a great way to boost your other SEO results. And sometimes, it can even get you into the top spots.

Lets run through the mechanics behind it.  The key is making your videos findable by Google search. On its own, video is pretty hard to recognise and catalog. But by adding what’s called a video site map, you can solve this problem. You can create site maps for videos your hosting yourselves with online tutorial . Or ask your web developer to add the relevant code to the pages on your site.

The way you optimise the title, keywords and description follows the same rules as SEO: the key is to think like a customer would, and choose the words and phrases that they’re likely to be using when they search the web. Many of the current best practice guidelines in SEO are the same for video SEO, for example the first word in the title is the most important. As with body copy, properly embedded subtitles can make a difference to the keywords and phrases around the content, depending on how they’re stored on the page

What if I just upload my videos to YouTube, and have them show up in search results automatically? If you upload a video to YouTube, it will show up in rich snippet results. But that link will actually go back to YouTube, and not to your site. If you’re making great content, you might want to think about getting the benefits of that traffic on to your own website. Just like SEO, there lots of tips and tricks you can use to optimise for video SEO. Things like transcripts, descriptions, and social shares can all help you rank higher in results.

So those are the basics of video SEO. No excuses now not optimise the videos to the max!