Getting Started with Video SEO

By Brian Doubleday, Greenworks Video Senior Producer & CWCC Member

When it comes to hosting online videos, there are a bevy of, high-quality options, both free and pay.  YouTube, Vimeo, Brightcove and TinyPic are just a few of the many video hosts that would be happy to have you upload your latest video their servers and allow you to unobtrusively embed the videos in your website.  This solution to video hosting is convenient and cost-effective, since the cost is free and eliminates the cost of building a video player and hosting it on a server.  However, getting those embedded videos to rank their associated website high in search engines is a difficult task and only recently have Video SEO solutions begun to emerge.

SEO for webpages is difficult, because search engines are constantly updating and changing search algorithm rules to thwart “black hat” SEO marketers who don’t play by the rules of SEO.  Typical website SEO is generally text-driven, but since videos lack any text, they are quite difficult for marketers to optimize for search engines.

A great first step to get search results with your embedded videos and drive traffic to your website is submitting a “video sitemap” to search engines.  This small .xml file includes information about your video that provides information about the video such as “title, description, the page the video is on, the location of the content and a thumbnail of the video.”  It is also advisable to put a transcript of the video in the description of the video in order to hit the highest number of relevant keywords.

This is a great first step in harnessing the potential of getting traffic to your website using video search optimization tactics.  For additional information on video sitemapping, check out some great resources at Creating a Video Sitemap and Video Sitemap Generator.

To learn more about using video for business or personal promotion and to meet Brian Doubleday of Greenworks Video, join us on May 18th for Video, SEO and You. At this event Brian will teach you tips and tricks including how to get the best SEO performance, optimize video meta-data for search engines and how to use You Tube as a search engine.

Founded in April, 2010, Greenworks Video has rapidly grown to become one of Denver’s premier video studios. Greenworks specializes in corporate video for the web, and we want to help you change the way you use video in your business. Greenworks has created cost-effective, engaging video solutions that sell, communicate, educate and entertain. Our state-of-the-art green screen video production studio is providing Colorado companies with videos for sales, training, investor relations and a host of other critical communications needs. For more information visit http://www.greenworksvideo.com/.