The number of people searching for online video content is growing rapidly each day. Yet videos are often overlooked as an online marketing tool.
Don’t ignore video marketing; it can drive lots of new traffic to your website! Furthermore, people are more likely to remember a video than they are to remember text. Video content is exciting and people often trust the information in videos more than they trust the information in online articles.
Google includes video links in organic search results and you can create online videos that will help attract new visitors to your website by using the following tips to search engine optimise your videos.
1. Use suitable keywords in your title
This will help search engines to understand what your video is about and will thus give your video a higher ranking for your search words. Remember, search engines can’t ‘see’ what’s on your video, you have to help them! It’s also a good ideal to use ‘video’ as a keyword, as many people search for this on google.
2. Include a SEO description of your video
Once again, this will help search engines to understand your videos content which means your video will rank higher.
3. Treat your video like an article or blog post
Don’t just put a video online and wait for something to happen; you must share your video on social media sites and encourage others to do so, just like you would about a normal article or blog-post! You should also ensure users can rate and comment on your video and you should reply to all comments, and you need to build links to your video in the same way that you do to written content.
But don’t just build links for the sake of building links, it’s far better to earn your links from the video content rather than run a link building campaign and to get any kinds of low quality links.
4. Create a video sitemap and submit to Google Webmaster Tools
It’s tricky to create a video sitemap if you’re videos are hosted on YouTube, however if you’re self-hosting or using third-party hosting for your video content, then creating a sitemap is relatively straight forward. The video sitemap protocol is slightly different from the standard sitemap protocol with a few more attributes to get acquainted with, such as <video:content_loc>, <video:thumbnail_loc> and more.
Google Webmaster Guidelines provides more information on the video sitemap protocol, as well as a template version to adapt. Once you’re done with creating the video sitemap, submit it to Google Webmaster Tools. If there’s any associated errors you’ll see this soon show up via the console.
It’s important in your online marketing strategy not to ignore the power of video, and optimising your video content for maximising visibility is one sure-fire way to drive further traffic to your videos and website.
