Last week we discussed the importance of content in your SEO strategy. This week I want to focus on a specific type of content – the video.
Videos are a great addition to your website for numerous reasons they are; entertaining for your viewers to watch, a great way to captivate an audience, a creative way to get a certain message across, useful for training purposes and, an effective way to boost your SEO campaign.
Effective SEO for video’s
When incorporating video’s into your SEO campaign it is important to remember that search engines are not humans, they are like spiders who crawl through the coding of your websites, you need to ensure the format of your videos are compatible with these search engines. Formats such as Java and Flash cannot be read by search engines and thus are not good formats for websites to use in SEO strategies. If these types of formats have to be used, be sure to incorporate other information that the search engine can read such as text alongside the video, labels or captions.
If you are making your own video content, it would be to your benefit to ensure it is in a format that will appear to search engines. You don’t want to spend all this time on creating helpful video’s for your website and not have them show up in prominent search engine rankings.
Keys to optimising video’s
Firstly, when creating a video which you want to rank highly in search engines you should start with a descriptive and effective title. This is the first aspect that will appear in any search, so ensure this encapsulates exactly what your video is about, whilst also appealing to users.
Alt tags are another effective way to link your video to relevant content. When using alt tags to link to anchor text, be as descriptive as possible so that the link is recognised as related to the content. A short description of the video should include relevant keywords. It is also a good idea to be specific and even obvious in your description- this way anyone who looks at it knows that it is; a video and, the content of the video.
Sites such as YouTube are popular hosts for video content. Although this is an effective platform to display your video content, it is important to remember when uploading be sure to re-input any meta information to ensure it shows up in the search results of the site.
A good video gets to the point fast; it is informative and simple to understand. Just as you would with any other SEO content ensure the video is relevant, concise and consumer direct. If you effectively utilise video on your website it could have a positive impact on your SEO and website traffic.
