Understanding how to optimize a video is going to be incredibly important for the remainder of the year. It is no secret that more and more consumers are turning to video as a way to educate themselves and learn more about certain products and services.
Video helps make complicated topics easy to understand, and it helps keep consumers engaged. This is largely part of the reason that Google has put out so many videos to compliment the articles they write.
When it comes to creating a video for your average small business, it is typically published on the website, YouTube, or both.
This means that the video needs to be optimized in the same way that a piece of content needs to be optimized. You still want your video to earn a top search engine result rankingeven if the way you get there is slightly different.
How to Optimize a Video for Search Engines
Optimizing your videos works similarly to content, but you might want to be focusing on YouTube ranking more than Google ranking. In either case, there are a few tips that you should follow to get you to the top:
Title and Description
Keywords are everything, and your title and description are great places to incorporate these keywords. Google bots can only determine what a video is about by the text on the page, so make the most of it! Also as a side note, you don’t want your title to be longer than 66 characters because Google will truncate anything longer.
Various Tags
Tags work the same way that they work with traditional content. You want to use not only your keywords, but also tag the content with words and phrases that someone might use to look up that particular video. When it comes to YouTube, the related articles on the side of the webpage are chosen based on the similarity between tags. This can help you earn clicks.
Earn Backlinks
Videos benefit from backlinks just like articles. The more websites linking to your video, the better it looks in the eyes of the bots. If you’re ever writing an article and posting it on another website (or even your own website), don’t forget to link back to your video page.
Transcriptions
Transcriptions of the video are great for those who like to follow along, but they also work well for optimization. If you mention your keyword a lot in your video (which you should), a transcript will only improve the keyword density of that page. It helps the bots index that content correctly.
Rich Snippets
Enabling rich snippets is a great way to show Google users that you have a great video on a particular subject. Rich snippets allow the video to show up right on a Google SERP.
Many companies consider using an SEO plugin for video to help make sure they don’t miss a beat. An SEO plugin will help you check off all of these different optimization methods and remind you if you’re missing something that could help your video rank. One of the most popular plugins include SEO by Yoast. You can learn more and read about more choices here.
Author: Amanda DiSilvestro
Courtesy of www.link-assistant.com