Video: Putting Your Best Face Forward - After You’ve Submitted Your Site - SEO For Dummies, 6th Edition (2016)

SEO For Dummies, 6th Edition (2016)

Part IV. After You’ve Submitted Your Site

Chapter 20. Video: Putting Your Best Face Forward

In This Chapter

arrow Understanding the benefits of using video

arrow Optimizing videos on your own site

arrow Getting videos into video hosting sites

arrow Using videos to grab search engine “real estate”

Most people don’t generally think of video sites as search engines, but for the last few years, that’s just what the largest video site has become. YouTube has billions of searches every month — more, in fact, than Yahoo! or Bing. You might think of YouTube as the world’s second largest search engine.

At the time of writing, YouTube was reporting that it has a billion users, viewing 4 billion videos every day. Three hundred hours of video is being uploaded every minute.

Video is big. But how do you use it from a search engine perspective? This chapter tells you about the SEO benefits of working with video, the best ways and places to upload video, and how to do so most effectively.

The SEO Benefits of Video

So how can you benefit, from an SEO perspective, from video? In these ways:

· Providing content on your site that search engines like: That’s the theory, anyway, but the reality is a little different, as I detail in a moment.

· Getting listed in more search engines — the video search engines: YouTube is a hugely important search engine. So getting videos into YouTube (and other video-search sites) gets you into the video-search game.

· Grabbing search engine real estate: This is in some ways more important because Google likes to insert videos into its search results, as you can see in Figure 20-1.

image

Figure 20-1: Video inserted into the Google search results.

Videos on your site

The most obvious benefit to putting videos on your site, from an SEO perspective, is that it provides content that the search engines like, and you’ll often hear that as a reason given for using video on your site. The reality is a little different; videos are not particularly good search engine fodder, although you can improve that situation a bit. The proof of the pudding is in the eating, they say; when videos are embedded into the search results, they are almost always from major video sites, such as YouTube.com and Vimeo.com.

Ah, I can hear someone in the back mumbling, “But Google listens to the videos and transcribes them!” That’s true, or at least was for a while. In fact, if you go to YouTube.com and view a video (YouTube is owned by Google, by the way), look for a little CC button in the bottom-right corner of the video player. (It may or may not be there — one of those “here today, gone tomorrow” things.) If it is there, then click the button, and you can play the audio with “closed caption” transcription shown at the bottom of the video.

Automated transcriptions are problematic, though. Here’s a transcription I got from YouTube some time ago. See whether you can figure out what this is all about:

But this is not something audiences for instance and decision on right this second and faint dot com and their pretty amazing yes I always wanted only a lot some may still a year maybe a favorite and your ratings are important they help determine the top ten finalists I think answer is get your friends and family behind and if you think that there’s a great privilege to you they say let’s everybody was the standard and so then check out those the is a great great great and if you get Iraq ice-cold can separate store

Believe it or not, this is a transcription of a promotional video from Coca Cola’s Fanta soft drink, promoting a contest to find the fourth “Fantana girl.” What, you didn’t get that? I must admit that I’ve seen better transcriptions than this, but the system is definitely not perfect.

So, if you think that the search engines will listen to and transcribe your videos into something that might actually help you, think again. Not this year, anyway, or the next.

Is Google trying to transcribe the videos it finds on the Web at present? I don’t know, but even if it is, don’t expect a video sitting on your site to do you much good from an SEO perspective, unless you help it along a bit. Like this:

· Label it. Create a nicely keyworded label or short description of the video; use an <H> tag in the HTML around this label.

· Describe it. Include a longer description, again with good keywords.

· Transcribe it. Do a real transcription and post the transcribed text on the page. Services exist that can do this for you very affordably and pretty efficiently.

· Name it. Use keywords in the video’s filename and URL.

· Link to it. Create links, on your site and others, to the video page, using keywords and the term video in the link. This is very important; providing links into the video page can help a lot.

· Tag it. As usual, use keywords (including the word video) in your page’s <TITLE> tag and DESCRIPTION tag.

· Add to it. Add other keyworded content on the page, especially if the transcription is short.

· Submit it. You can include video content in your sitemap (which I discuss in Chapter 13) or create a special mRSS (media RSS) feed, providing the video title, description, a thumbnail URL, and so on. Some video experts believe that submitting both a regular sitemap and an mRSS sitemap is a good idea. You can find details about both in the Google Webmaster Help information.

Use the word video throughout; remember, you’re trying to tell the search engines that this is a video. Don’t overdo it, but you can use the term video in the <H> tag, the description, the filename, links, <TITLE> tag and DESCRIPTION meta tag, and so on.

technicalstuff Don’t use pop-up video players; embed them into the page. If you do use pop-ups, the danger is that the video isn’t found by the search engines, especially if the pop-up is generated by JavaScript. Also, the video may be “orphaned” in the search results, much the same way as framed pages become orphaned (as I describe in Chapter 9).

You might also allow other people to embed your video into their sites; this can help create links back to the video, assuming that people actually take you up on the offer.

Have you heard about Google TV (https://www.android.com/tv/)? No, it wasn’t the huge success everyone thought it would be, but it’s still around, renamed Android TV. The basic idea: a television search engine. Imagine your TV set getting TV from wherever you normally get it (cable, satellite, or over the air) and connecting to the Internet. Add a search engine — Google, of course — and now you can search and find exactly the show, documentary, funny video, or whatever, and view it from wherever it may be.

Now, because of this, Google is getting more serious about indexing video on the Web. In particular, Google is eager to get your video-sitemap data. As Mr. Google SEO, Matt Cutts (see Chapter 23) said a while back, “If you tell us where your videos are, we will try to index them a little bit harder. For example, if you think about things like Google TV… it’s in everybody’s interest that all the videos that are on the Web be able to be very discoverable and very searchable.” Google wants your video, so make it easy for Google to get it.

Playing the video search engine game

If you go to the trouble of creating videos, why not distribute them as widely as possible, on as many video sites as possible? Remember, these are search engines, too, so being present when someone searches for your keywords would be good. As Woody Allen said, “Eighty percent of success is showing up,” and if you’re not in the video sites, you’re not showing up. So, here are a few tips for you on uploading your videos:

· “Watermark” your videos. Now and then you’ll find videos, on the video-upload sites or perhaps embedded into someone’s Web site, with no identifying information in the video itself. You need to make sure your videos stand alone as a marketing tool for your site, so watermarkthe videos with your site’s domain name — at the very least at the beginning and end of the video, but ideally on every single frame so that no one can view the video without knowing where it comes from. (If you have videos that are not watermarked, you can use the Annotation tool on YouTube to overlay text onto the video. Oh, use keywords when you annotate, too!)

· Provide plenty of keyworded descriptive info. The video-upload services provide space for you to supply a title, description, and keywords (or tags). Use them and use them fully — by entering a long description with plenty of keywords, for instance.

· Include a link to your Web site. Put it in the URL field if the service provides one, or the description if it doesn’t. You want people to be able to find your site, after all. Note, however, that most video sites provide nofollow links (see Chapter 16 for details on nofollow links), so you won’t get rank-boosting value in the search engines from them.

· Put your domain at the top of the description, in particular on YouTube. YouTube hides your video description, except for the first line, so to ensure that people see your site’s URL, you need to put it on the first line.

· Encourage your consumers or social fans to comment on your videos (ideally, to leave a video comment). In addition to leaving a regular comment below a YouTube video, you can also leave a video comment there as well. Google may like these comments, perhaps because the fact that it requires more effort suggests it may be more reasoned and useful.

· Include a transcript or caption file. YouTube allows you to upload time-coded captions or a plain-text transcription file. (You have to upload the file first, view the file in your Uploaded Videos area, and then click the Captions button.) Google will probably read these files.

There are literally dozens of video hosting sites to which you can upload your videos. You can find a good list at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_hosting_websites. Of course, it’ll take you, um, forever to upload to all of them. So you should consider using a video-upload service, which works by having you load the video once into the distribution service so that the service can then upload to a variety of different sites. For instance, OneLoad (www.oneload.com) will upload your video to over 20 different services (up to ten times a month for free). Another distribution service is TrafficGeyser.com, which can upload to a similar number (and has some other advantages, which I discuss in a moment).

Incidentally, the ranking of videos on the upload sites is not just a matter of keywords and links to the page. On YouTube, for instance, other aspects may be taken into consideration, such as

· The number of times the video is viewed

· The ratings given to the video by viewers

· The number of times the video was shared

· The number of comments

· The number of people subscribing to the video publisher’s channel after viewing the video

· The number of times the video is embedded into viewers’ own Web sites

Trying to make your video go viral? Understanding the preceding list will provide clues to how to make that happen! (Of course, you also need something that’s viral quality, not just your last Disney vacation video.)

Grabbing search engine real estate

So, you’ve got your videos uploaded to the video-upload sites. You now have a chance of being found in what are, in effect, video search engines. But as the search engines index some of these video sites, you also now have a chance of your videos turning up in the regular search results (refer to Figure 20-1).

But there is a bit more to the game, if it’s played right. If you want to encourage the search engines to rank your videos well, you really need links pointing to the videos. That’s right, you need to create links from various places to the video-upload sites; as Chapter 16 notes, links help pages rank, so it makes sense that your videos on a video-upload site might need a few links to help them rank. TrafficGeyser.com actually automates this process, uploading videos to the video hosting services and posting links to the videos on social-networking sites.