Over the past few years, the web-based video industry has exploded thanks to streaming video websites such as YouTube and the increasing speeds of broadband internet. As a result, the SEO Industry is beginning to realise the marketing possibilities of online video and how to achieve Video SEO effectively.

If you’re unfamiliar with the act of Video SEO, it’s essentially the process of optimising a video to help it rank in the major search engines and video indexing websites such as Google Video.

Throughout the next month we’ll be publishing a series of Video SEO Tips discussing how you can effectively optimise your own videos to help them appear in the Search Engines. In this week’s blog post, Nick Rinylo discusses the Importance of Video Titles when publishing your own Videos as part of an SEO Campaign.

Mixed media search isn’t a new thing, Google’s Universal Search has been around for ages, it’s just now that people are starting to realise that you need to incorporate more than just web based search into your SEO campaigns.

What does this mean?

It means that your brand needs to be incorporating more than just text based search into its SEO campaign. You should ensure that your brand performs in all the different strands of search results available today. These include, video, image, news, and more, including the newest; real time search.

Larry Cornett of Yahoo simply puts it this way: “Am I really being represented the way I want to be in every one of these search experiences?”

Video for SEO

Video is going to play a bigger and bigger role online. Why? Because it’s interactive, it can be interesting and informative as well as entertaining and fun all at the same time. And that’s what people want. Of course you must optimise your videos, otherwise they will get lost amongst the thousands of competing videos.

You can say a lot with video. You can have a video presenter on your homepage to introduce your company. This is great for visitors as it means they don’t have to read everything written on your site (though don’t remove the words – that’s all Google can consume at present) to understand what services your company provides.

Maybe you could have a video to demonstrate your products? This, again is very useful to your end user, they can see exactly what it is you are offering. They can see how your products work, and more importantly how they can benefit from what it is that you are providing.

Your videos must be optimised, or you’ll lose the benefit of having them in the first place. You will need to make sure that our videos appear in Google’s video search. This is important for your brand, as you want your videos to appear when someone searches for your brand. Make sure you choose an SEO company that has experience in video optimisation because there are subtle differences in the approach to video 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.