Web Videos and Seo
When you have a website, it’s important that you put a strong emphasis on your search engine optimization. Having a strong SEO strategy will help your site get found by more people, thus increasing the traffic and success of your site.
There are plenty of tactics you can implement to boost your SEO. Adding keyword-rich content to your site, starting a blog, gaining valuable backlinks and even customizing your URL with keywords can greatly improve the reach of your site.
However, when it comes to implementing an SEO strategy, there are a few things that people don’t realize could actually be hurting their results. If you have videos on your website and they’re not optimized for SEO, your videos could be doing more harm than good. So how do you ensure your videos help your SEO?
Create quality videos.
If you are going to place videos on your website, you need to make sure they are high in quality. Videos are a great way to captivate your audience and provide them with entertainment or information, and if you place poor quality videos on your site, your audience will stop watching them and leave your site.
When you have high-quality videos on your site, it makes them more attractive to your visitors. They will then be more likely to watch the video and then share it with their own friends and followers via email or social media, thus increasing your reach and traffic and boosting your SEO.
Add titles, tags and descriptions.
On the back end of every video, you can add a title, tag and description. Make sure you are doing this. Search engines cannot crawl through your video and use the content towards your SEO efforts, but they can crawl through the back end and use the title, tag and description they find to better rank your site. Because of this, you want to make sure that your titles, tags and descriptions are rich in keywords.
Don’t annoy your viewers.
Videos can help increase your SEO by keeping your visitors on your page for a long period of time. However, if your video annoys your viewers, they will end up leaving quickly. Two of the biggest nuisances to web visitors when it comes to videos are that they’re too long and/or they auto start.
In order to keep your audiences’ attention, you need to keep your online videos less than three minutes in length. Anything longer, and your audience will start to lose interest and move on to something else. You also want to make sure that you don’t have your video set up to auto start. Instead, give your visitors the ability to decide if and when they want to watch your video. If you auto start, you force them to quickly find the pause or mute buttons, and this frustrates them enough to have them leave your site. If they don’t stick around, your SEO doesn’t improve.
Put your video on social media.
The easiest way to spread your video and earn traffic to your site is to place your video on social media. All content you create should be shared to social media. Make sure that you are pushing the video’s link out on any and all social media networks you have access to. Not only will you earn more traffic and views, but you’ll also allow your fans and followers to push your content out to their fans and followers, thus increasing your reach, traffic and SEO.
Add a call to action.
There’s likely a purpose to your video, but if you don’t call it out, your audience won’t know. For example, if your video is teaching your audience how to use a product, use a call to action at the end of the video that leads to a page on your site where they could buy the product or a link to your live customer service page. This increases your conversion rate and keeps your audience on your website for longer periods of time, thus improving your SEO.
Place transcriptions on your website.
Search engines cannot crawl through the content of your video, so the keywords used in the video don’t help improve your SEO—that is unless you place a transcription of the video directly on your website. When you have a transcription on your site, you are giving the search engines physical keyword-rich content to crawl through and use to rank your site more appropriately. This increases your SEO.
You can employ a video transcription service with low rates per minute in order to transcribe the content for you. And if you break the transcription down into relevant sections with relevant keywords and place them on separate web pages, it will improve the content density for your site and give each page a better search engine ranking.
If you are going to have videos on your website, you need to use these tips to ensure the videos help boost your SEO instead of break it.
Guest Author: Meyling Lau is a freelance writer and online marketing consultant with SEOMap.com. Lizzie combines personal opinions and research to create appealing and informative articles on various topics.
