Everyone says content is king in the SEO world and most people think this is strictly text content. Amazingly though videos with very little text content (a title and description) can be your most powerful content for optimizing search rankings and potentially your conversion rate. Considering 77% of people online watched a video on the internet in November 2008 and since this online community are making e-commerce purchases; you want to be in front of this growing crowd.
In April 2009, YouTube received 3.2 billion searches beating both Yahoo and Microsoft in volume of searches. Also, YouTube saw a 9% increase in searches performed from March to April which is larger than the increase by Google, Yahoo and Microsoft sites. Given that YouTube is growing the fastest and getting a large number of searches each month you probably should make videos a top priority of your marketing plan. The numbers for YouTube are only getting bigger which means if you are not showing up in video results then the potential revenue you are losing is getting bigger each month too.
Google also embeds video results into standard search results enticing potential customers to view your competitors’ videos if you don’t have any showing up. So the 9.8 billion searches in Google for April 2009 inevitably led some people to videos too.
Ok, so enough with the big numbers behind YouTube and online videos. Lets get into how videos can help you with your SEO campaign coupled with some tips to get the most out of your videos once you create them.
One thing I have noticed over the past year is videos have a huge amount of weight in the search engines and don’t get knocked for duplicate content as easily (if at all). I have personally observed this phenomenon becoming more prevalent over the past 18 months so don’t expect it to go away. Another dirty little secret about online videos is they are great for getting one way links to your site. For example, a video on a particular product is a great way to build deep links to your product pages to get them ranked better.
Here are three quick tips to get the most SEO benefit out of your videos and you might even raise your conversion rate along the way.
Video Title & Description
Whenever you upload a video to YouTube or some other video sharing site you will be prompted for at least a title, description and either tags or keywords. Each of these fields has tremendous SEO value when utilized properly. Use the keyword phrase you want to rank for in the search engines in all three sections: title, description and tags or keywords. You may want to include your domain name in the description if space permits but this does not get counted as a link.
Your video title will ultimately determine how many people watch your video. A great potential viral video can be made or broken by the title. In the search results and on the video sharing sites, the video title is the most prominent and often only text available. Given this, your title needs to entice people to watch and include your keyword if possible. Sometimes it is worth having a great title without your keywords if you truly believe the video will spark a huge amount of interest in the internet community. In this case, save the keyword phrase for the video description and tags.
Multiple Video Sites
Use a service such as Tube Mogul to upload your videos to multiple sites since this will give you multiple links from unique domains. You must signup at each video site you want to use at Tube Mogul which can be time consuming but you only need to register once. I recommend keeping a spreadsheet of the sites and logins you create; you may even consider using Roboform or similar password software. It is worth briefly mentioning three other strategies; hosting videos on your own site, putting your videos exclusively on one video site or putting your videos on multiple video sites with an unique title and description of the video for each video sharing site.
Share Your Videos
Submit bookmarks to your best videos at places like Digg, Reddit, Stumble Upon. Then encourage your visitors to vote for the video by placing share links on the page of your site that has the embedded video. If you see another blog or website comments about your video or syndicates the video then leave a comment and share their blog post on Digg or similar site.
You can get a bigger list of sites to share videos or blog posts at socialmarker.com. Note I do not endorse using the Socialmarker service since it could be considered spam if used in a bad way; however, the listing of sites is great. Another site worth checking out in the social media / web 2.0 world is http://www.go2web20.net/. I love the way their classic layout works but it can be a little slow.
So can you really completely forget about text content and focus on just video? No. You still have text titles and descriptions so there is still some text content creation. Also you will be creating a script for the video in most cases. In some cases you will want a transcript of the video so you have the video content on the page for the search engine spiders as well. However, the great thing about video is the content you create can be reused multiple times on multiple sites in multiple ways making it worth the investment.
One tangent on online video behavior, people who watch videos on Hulu.com spend almost 12 minutes on average watching a video much higher than the industry average of 3 minutes so I recommend putting your videos on at least YouTube and Hulu; especially if they are longer than 3 minutes.
Do you have any video promotion tips to share? Leave a comment below so everyone can learn more.
Sources:
http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2009/1/US_Online_Video_Viewing