9 Top Tips for Video SEO
Whilst it is important to make the most of your video content, you need to make sure that you follow certain guidelines. Most importantly, you need to outline the aim of your videos, and your SEO strategy as a whole. You also need to make sure that they grab peoples’ attention. There are billions of videos available online, so yours should stand out as much as possible.
Follow our tips below to ensure that you’re making the most of your video content, from an SEO perspective:
1 – Content: It is important to make the content of your videos as informative, entertaining and relevant as possible. It should be rich with content, and have a purpose. The most successful videos seem to be those which are memorable, relatively short and which leave the viewer wanting more. Those which demonstrate step-by-step processes, as well as those which express opinions about relevant topics, typically do quite well. Don’t spend time working on videos which are dull, pointless, and which have no relevance to your company or brand.
2 – Title: The title of your videos can be easily optimised. Make sure that you include your main keywords, whilst making it catchy and interesting. Keyword research will help define the keywords which are best suited to your company or services. Try to make your video titles eye-catching, something that will compel people to watch it after reading the title.
3 – Description: A video description is a brilliant way to entice people into watching your video, whilst improving your website SEO. You can include a number of vital SEO keywords, whilst making it interesting and engaging. Whilst it should be keyword rich to grab the attention of Google and similar search engines crawling your content, it should also attract those people visiting your website.
4 – Tags: It is easy to add tags to most video platforms, but many people don’t bother. It is the perfect opportunity to add a variety of keywords related to the service or goods you are promoting. Ensure that you use keywords which are easy for people to understand. Whilst certain terminology is useful and can represent experience and knowledge, you need to make sure that you don’t discourage people who don’t understand these keywords from viewing your videos.
5 – Sitemap: Most people know the importance of uploading an XML sitemap to their website – it is a vital part of website SEO. However, not many of us have heard about Video Sitemaps. These are a very important aspect of video SEO. Adding a video sitemap to your website allows Google and similar search engines to crawl the information on your website, as well as the information within the videos. They can then begin to rank your website for keywords related to your video content. Once you have created a video sitemap, it is important to submit it directly to Google, via Webmaster Tools.
6 – Branding: It is important to make the most of your branding when creating videos for your website. This can increase brand awareness and promote your logo / company name to people viewing your website, who may not have heard of you before. Take advantage of this when creating video content for your website.
7 – Links: When you upload videos to external platforms such as YouTube and Vimeo, they create backlinks to your website. Having backlinks from video websites with a high Google Page Rank score, and with good SEO, can improve your own search engine optimisation. Adding links to your videos within other websites with similar content to yours can also help.
8 – Embedding: When you embed your videos, make sure that you allow other people access to the coding. If others are able to share your videos and embed them elsewhere, then this can help your videos reach larger audiences. This can even help your videos go viral. It also helps create backlinks and valuable shares.
9 – Exposure: You want your videos to be seen by as many people as possible, without spamming. Share them with contacts – can be by email, on social network websites, on blogs and so on. You can even submit the videos to RSS feeds to further increase exposure.
The above tips are important aspects of Video SEO. For more detail or if you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact the SEO professionals at Varn.
