More about Video SEO

By Brian Doubleday, Greenworks Video Senior Producer & CWCC Member

In Part 1 of our discussions on Video SEO, we talked about the importance of submitting an XML site map to search engines such as Google and Bing for your embedded videos.  We also briefly talked about third party video hosts, such as YouTube and Vimeo, but we didn’t recommend which one to use, so here is our answer: If your company has enough time and manpower, put your videos on as many reputable sites as possible.  The more your videos are out there, the higher the possibility that someone will see it!

However, no matter which video host you choose or how many you put them on, we suggest that you always put your videos on YouTube.  Since Google owns YouTube, if you optimize your YouTube video correctly, your video has a good chance of being picked up by Google’s search spiders and pushed to the top of Google search results! This is a no-brainer!

Here are some tips on how to help optimize your YouTube videos for SEO:

• Be descriptive and specific in video titles. Use as many keywords as possible in the title in order to differentiate it from similar videos.  Don’t be shy: do a YouTube search of videos of topics that may be similar to your own.  Be sure to name it something different than what is already out there!
• Video descriptions should be unique, creative and of course, descriptive!  Incorporate relevant keywords into your description and don’t be scared of writing too much; as long as the content of the description isn’t just fluff, the detail in your description will help your videos get noticed.
• If there is dialogue in your video, transcribe key points of the conversation and put it in your description.
• Include links to your other social networks profiles, as well as a link back to your company’s website (because after all, the whole point of this is to drive traffic back to your website, right?).
• Tags: Tag videos in order to help search spiders identify the content of the video.  It is okay to be more concise with these tags, since “tag stuffing” (using too many tags) is frowned upon by search engines and is often times counterproductive.
• Choose a thumbnail for your video that will catch the eye of potential viewers and make them want to check out the video; this critical step is often overlooked by uploaders and can be the difference between a video going viral and a video scrape by with a modest number views.
• Remember, number of views and ratings are taken into consideration by search spiders, so the more the better!

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/.