W3 Spin|Internet news blog

All have heard about the online video phenomenon that is hitting the internet. Viewers by the millions are going online to upload and watch online video content each day. Often, videos are a more effective way to convey an advertiser’s message than typical offline advertising. And because video is becoming so mainstream, the cost to create online video content is extremely low and affordable for almost anyone. Online video has seen massive improvements in the past 2 years with regard to broadband connectivity, streaming, etc… Keeping in mind the vast popularity of online video as a method of internet marketing, it is important to learn the techniques most effective for optimizing your video for search engines.

1) It is recommended that you create and submit a transcript for users and the search engines, add a transcript to each video file you’ve uploaded via your Video Status page. Create a Keyword Rich Title for your Transcript; include a brief introductory paragraph/synopsis that describes the subject matter of your transcript (and video) and be sure to publish your transcript.

2) Don’t forget to encode the keywords you are targeting into your video. Try to use the word “video” as much as possible, make sure the word “video” is used in your title, description, meta data etc.

3) Search engine crawlers rely a lot on the link texts to figure out what the video is all about as they are not capable to figure out the contents of the video otherwise. Therefore it is advisable to get as many back links as possible for your video.

4) It is advisable to create a separate sitemap just for your videos in your site and try to keep your video files in one directory this would help the web crawlers to locate your video files speedily and effortlessly.

5) If you are hosting the video on your own site, it is advisable to do your best to utilize a player that is not flash as search engines have difficulty understanding flash content. That being said, it will be difficult to empower video on your site without a simiple flash player. If you can not get around it, do your best to take advantage of the other SEO techniques since search engines cant understand the flash technology.

6) Create search engine friendly keyword URLs for your video pages. To do this, you can use mod-rewrite function or htaccess file so that the URLs are freely assessable and readable by the search engines.

7) More than anything, I have learned that the thumbnail that you choose for your video is one of the most important factors in terms of the number of people that choose to view your video. With that in mind, try to experiment with various thumbnails until you have a good idea which images attract the most views from the audience that you are targeting.
Try to keep one video per page and put all video pages into the same directory or folder.

Besides the tips mentioned above for Video SEO, there are a few other guidelines to keep in mind:

9) With any SEO that you do online, choose keywords that you know users are searching for. Use keyword research tools to discover keywords and phrases that are most often searched for when looking for the information that you are creating.

10) Viewers who offer feedback are most likely to take the desired action on your video. This could be a good opportunity for you to submit fresh content, if the most popular videos were included months ago, it really helps.

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