Video SEO – Top 10 Tips

Online videos are a great way to get more visitors to your website and improve your SEO for chosen keywords and phrases.

Simply uploading a video to YouTube and hoping people will find it is not the best strategy. Have a read through our top 10 video SEO tips below to learn more…

• Do your keyword research

As with conventional SEO, the first step in video SEO should be choosing the most relevant keywords and phrases to optimise it for.

Once you’ve decided on your keywords after using an online tool, it’s wise to do a search for these on the video site such as YouTube to see what level of competition you’re up against.

• Use your keywords in the right places

To get the full benefit of video SEO you will need to place your keywords in the URL, title, tags and as early as possible in the video description.

• Use your video on your own website

When you’ve gone to the trouble of creating a video for your business, don’t just leave it on YouTube. Make sure you embed it into your own site as well as this will help engage your visitors and keep them on your site for longer.

• Add captions to your videos

When you upload your video to YouTube it’s possible to add captions. These can help people better understand the points you’re making in the video as well as being useful for people with hearing difficulties and beneficial for SEO.

• Make a series of videos

Rather than creating one long video for your business, it’s wise to break your content down into shorter clips. This will make sure your video’s hold people’s attention and also be good for SEO as you can link between your videos and people can watch them as a series.

• Use social media to post links to your video content

Whenever you’ve made a new video, it’s quick and easy to get traffic to it by posting links from your social media profiles on Twitter and Facebook. These are also a great way to get others to share your video content.

• Create your own YouTube channel

To increase awareness of your brand and maintain a professional image, it’s a good idea to create your own YouTube channel for your business. Doing this will let everyone know your company videos are official and you’ll also benefit when people link to them from other websites as your brand will be visible.

• Submit your video to sharing sites

While YouTube is the most popular video site on the web, there are many others out there. Rather than taking the time to submit your video individually to all the best sites, you can use a site like TubeMogul to do it for you.

• Create a video sitemap

As well as having a sitemap for your written content, you should also create a sitemap for your videos in order to get the maximum SEO benefit. Please visit Google’s guide to video sitemaps to find out how to go about this.

• Ask people to do something when your video ends

A call to action is an important part of written content and the same applies to video. Don’t just end your video abruptly; make sure you let people know what you’d like them to do next. For example this could be calling you for more information, asking them to download a free e-book or placing an order online.

If you enjoyed this article you may also want to read my top 10 video marketing tips

This entry was posted on Monday, December 13th, 2010 at 8:00 am and is filed under Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.