What is Video Search Engine Optimization?

Seo guide

What is Optimization?

    The design and operation of a system or process to make it as good as possible in some defined sense.

    Optimization – improving performance;
    Optimize – to make as perfect, effective, or functional as possible

What is Video Optimization?

“Video optimization” can mean one or several things in regards to online channels:

    Technical quality – where the physically measure attributes of a video can meet professionally acceptable standards, general audience standards, or target audience standards.
    Creative – the originality and expressiveness of a video.
    Value ­– the worth in usefulness or importance of a video to the possessor.
    Placement – the positioning or arrangement of a video is a desired space by the video’s owner.
    Distribution – the delivery and receipt of a video to the desired websites and unique visitors, measured in both quantity and quality.
    Analytics – the logical assessment of a video (i.e, “analysis”) for intended performance results, (i.e, “conversions.”)

What is Video Search Engine Optimization?

Video SEO, or “vSEO,” is about optimizing your video content for attracting unique visitors from web-based search engines’ organic results and video search results to your website.

Any success metric for vSEO must have 3 things in its foundation:

    An Algorithm – an effective method of well-defined instructions for optimizing your video for a search engine.
    Indexability – Having your videos, and the links to your website, web pages, and blog posts where those videos are embedded, be indexed by the search engines (both video search engines and universal search engines).
    Visibility – An improvement in the ranking or visibility of video in search engine listings related to your optimization efforts

Google isn’t the only engine indexing videos, Bing has also integrated video results but does not seem to place as much weight on them and the primary results do not always come from YouTube.  (Google owns Youtube, so this is no surprise.)

YouTube – Youtube is the most popular way to search for video content on the web. While hard data is hard to come by, if YouTube were a search engine, it would only be behind Google in terms of search queries, which have been estimated between 3-4 billion a month.

Social Media – Social media is a quick way to spread a video.  Videos can become viral instantly when placed on Twitter or Facebook.  Much like content network ads, people are not “searching” for videos but instead have them thrust under their noses and, in the right context, watch and pass the video along to an even wider audience.  Social media won’t fit every type of video, and it’s important to note that not all videos need to be viral, many businesses can’t (and shouldn’t) produce videos with characteristics that commonly theme viral videos.   All videos should be made with the target market in mind, whether they will be viral or not is not necessarily relevant.



How To Optimize Videos

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• Name your files accurately, using keyword rich names rather than the default code number that is automatically assigned by your camera.
• Using the same target terms as selected for the video, optimize the rest of the web page on which your video is hosted.
• Add a keyword rich title and description for the video, as you would (and should), the rest of the web page.  (This should be included in the sitemap, as will be shown below)
• Look for anchor text opportunities when spreading the video.  That is, when sharing the video with others, ask them to utilize keyword rich anchor text linking back to the video.
• Encode your video using multiple file types, so that it’s easier to download and spread!

Include Videos in Your Sitemap –
Steps to Manually Create a Sitemap:

1. Create a text file and save it with an .xml extension.
2. Add the following to the top of the file:

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>
<urlset xmlns=”http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9″>

1. Add the following to the bottom of the file:

</urlset>

1. Create an entry for each URL. The <loc> tag is required; the others are optional.

<url>     <loc>http://www.example.com/</loc>     <lastmod>2005-01-01</lastmod>     <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>     <priority>0.8</priority> </url>

1. Upload your Sitemap to your site.  The file should be located at www.domain.com/sitemap.xml

Google’s webmaster central states, “Video content includes web pages which embed video, URLs to players for video, or the URLs of raw video content hosted on your site.  If Google cannot discover video content at the URLs you provide, those records will be ignored by Googlebot.” As such, each video URL entry in the sitemap must contain:

• The Video Title
• A Short Description
• Play page URL
• Thumbnail URL
• Raw video file location and/or the player URL (SWF)

A Few Video Sitemap Tips

• Make sure that your robots.txt file isn’t blocking any of the items (including the play page URL, the video URL, and the thumbnail URL) included in each Sitemap entry.

• Make sure that the information in your <video:title> and <video:description> fields match your live site as Google will verify this.

• Each Sitemap or mRSS feed file that you provide must be under 10MB in size when uncompressed, and can contain no more than 50,000 video items.  If your uncompressed file is larger than 10MB, or you have more than 50,000 videos, you can submit multiple sitemaps and a sitemap index file.

For a description of video-specific tags, and more tips, check out the rest of Google’s tips for creating a video sitemap. For more information on optimizing videos, check out the Youtube help section.  If any of you have more video tips that you would like to share with the crowd, I would love to hear them!
Amy is an Account Executive at Hanapin Marketing, a search engine marketing firm focused on generating results through PPC and SEO.