How Do I Optimize Video Content?
Hey guys, this is Jason Hennessey from EverSpark Interactive. If you keep up with SEO news or read our blog, you have been hearing for a while now that content has become increasingly important since the Panda update. When most people hear the word “content,” they think of anything that is written on a website. However, there are other important types of content, such as videos. Since we have already discussed the benefit of writing good blog posts and articles on our own blog, we have decided to talk more about how to optimize video content in the wake of the Panda update.
When you create a video, the first thing you do is put it on your site so that Google can see all the great content you have, right? Wrong. The first thing you should do is tell Google that you have posted a video; when you inform the search engine of this, you also need to explain to the Googlebots in the language they can understand exactly what the video is about. More about that in a minute.
First, let’s talk about video SEO. What’s so great about it is that the size of your company or your website really doesn’t matter when it comes to ranking your video. As a small start-up company with only a few pages on your website, you have just as much of a chance of ranking your video as a giant corporation with an extensive web presence. This is because, when it comes to video SEO, linking or any other typical SEO factors don’t really matter; all that matters is that Google indexes your video and that it understands your specific description of the content.
You might be wondering what kinds of videos you should make to best represent your business online. To create good video content, come up with original ways to draw your audience’s attention. For instance, you could hire a well-known and entertaining radio personality to interview your CEO about his job. Or, you could create a video documenting a company-wide charity effort. Make sure that your video contains something interesting, perhaps even funny, so that people will actually want to view it and share it with friends. You may even want to hire a professional to film your video to ensure that it is a quality video and therefore would be considered high-quality content by Google. The best case scenario would have your video going “viral,” meaning it is viewed by a lot of people in a short amount of time, and is widely shared across the internet.
After you create the actual video, the first thing to do when you are trying to get your video to the top of the search engine results page is submit a sitemap to Google via Google Webmaster Tools. This is how you alert Google to the fact that you have posted a video, and explain what it is to the Googlebots. You cannot just submit a page with video on it to Google and expect the video to be crawled and indexed; you have to specifically let Google know that you are submitting a video that you want to rank for certain search terms.
Beyond allowing your video to be viewed in the Google Video Search results, your video sitemap also tells Google what your video is about because they cannot view actual video. What does the sitemap specifically tell Google? Well, it provides the video’s title, which the search engine usually uses to match the video to search queries. An important tip for creating your video’s title is: Go long-tail. The longer and more specific your title, the more likely Google is to understand it and rank it high on the SERPs. For instance, if you post a video about building a house for charity, the title “Building a two-story home for charity” is more likely to get your video to the top of the rankings, whereas the title “House” might not have the same effect. If you want your video to match more than one search term, it might help you to submit the same video with different titles with different keywords. Just remember to make all titles as specific as possible.
Additionally, the site map provides Google with a description of your content and some keywords, which seem to have less bearing on how your video is matched with search queries. However, if the title tag of your page and the title of your video match, you are more likely to get your video to rank higher. By creating a detailed sitemap, you also allow Google to index your video more easily, since you are telling them exactly what your video is about and why it should rank high on the results page.
Content is so important that you simply cannot afford not to have it in this post-Panda day and age. If you still have concerns about your site’s content, visit our blog for important tips and advice for SEO after Panda. We update it daily with important news from search engines and fellow SEO experts. Thanks for watching and we’ll see you next time!