Last summer I got quite the incredible task: Video SEO.
Most of the sites I had under my control had their own video commercials that were integral parts of the user experience (if you could call it that). And before I knew it, the project became a race against competitors.
Now there are two types of Video SEO:
- YouTube Optimization
- SEO Optimization for the website
The first I’ll talk about is YouTube Optimization
A lot of common sense SEO Here. The best resource I found on this was from Reel SEO. Working for memory, here are some of the tips and tricks I use as a result of testing and some of the advice from Reel SEO.
1) You’ve done this type of onsite SEO before – Google will be the first one to tell you that the indexing principles in YouTube are the same as in indexing in the standard Google search engine.
2) Titles are that important – You’ve got little space in those titles, and like its older brother, those titles are important for targeting.
3) Description principles -The first principle is to put the full path URL in the beginning of the description. It helps with the CTA and makes it easier for the searcher to find your site and learn more about you. The second principle is to make use of the description space. If you have the transcript of the video, use it. But if you don’t, take the extra time to write a keyword rich description. And for the last principle: if there is more than one video in the series, link to the proceeding and preceding videos at the end of the description.
3) Tags work quite well – Remember when keywords were essential in indexing? Well, they still have an impact in the YouTube search engine.
4) Treat the video pages as pieces of content – ever seen a disparity in PageRank between videos? That’s because backlinks and trafficked videos can have a significant impact in rankings. 1 page; 1 URL. The same SEO principles apply. You can treat YouTube a user account like a website and the videos as pages of content.
Using these technique helped our websites get a significant boost in traffic. Of course, most of the videos also had significant TV push. But with some SEO, your videos can start ranking in Google searches (and YouTube searches).
This was the easy one of the two projects. Next week I’ll start to talk about the testing done with Video SEO Optimization on websites.
     | do some of that social network stuff. |
