A picture may say a thousand words… but how can video help your SEO?
With YouTube Fast Becoming The “Second Search Engine” Is It Time For You To Invest In Video SEO?
Not only can using pictures and videos on websites help to engage your audience, it can also improve your search engine optimisation. Content is crucial and it is not only comprised of text – it is important not to underestimate the use of multimedia.
So, to start with pictures – using pictures on your site can help your optimisation in a number of ways. On a technical level, if you ensure that you use descriptive alt tags containing your keywords, in addition to keyword rich titles and filenames, a picture can serve as a helpful boost to SEO. Further to this, pictures often need a short caption to explain the content they are illustrating, which can also help.
One of the biggest trends from this year has been video SEO. If a picture says a thousand words, imagine how many a video can say! Online video distribution channels like YouTube have grown at an exponential rate, with statistics indicating that with over 100 million users in the US alone, the site now provides 42 million video streams every hour or 700,000 every minute. Clearly this has potential as a vast marketing platform, and already, many users are aware of this.
For successful video SEO there are some important tips to bear in mind. Firstly – keep it short! Viewers are as easily bored as readers, if not more so, so ensure your video sticks to the point. The title is also a crucial aspect of video optimisation, and can be seen as the key selling point of your video. If it doesn’t grab attention, chances are not many people will be watching it. Finally, be careful with mass distribution sites, it has been suggested that by distributing to a wide variety of video sites, the overall effect of your video may be diluted.
The crucial point to bear in mind is that regardless of how far it helps your search engine optimisation, including videos and pictures is still be a great idea. The main point of having a website in the first place is to communicate with your audience and using multimedia effectively can help to do just that.
October 14th, 2009
I’m hearing from an increasing number of sources that having video on your site leads to increasing conversion. This isn’t SEO as such but it’s worth bearing in mind. Good article.
BB