Video SEO best practices are something that a majority of websites could use but often put-off because of cost and time. But website owners can actually leverage some or all of video SEO best practices without spending a lot and without having to invest too much time. In fact, just the presence of one video can significantly increase traffic, so long as it follows video SEO best practices. And by indulging key aspects of video SEO best practices, a site can turn casual visitors into repeat customers as well as build a larger audience.
Video SEO Best Practices Effects
A frill to some, but invaluable to others, video has tremendous search engine optimization potential. It’s those site owners who fundamentally understand video SEO best practices which reap the benefits of this audio-visual element:
- Sticky positioning. Videos often out perform text, still images and audio. It’s because videos are interactive and can provide more insight into a particular product or service than plain text and images.
- Upsell capabilities. Another benefit of video SEO best practices is TOS or Time On Site. Visitors will stay on a site longer if video is present. What’s more, because of their ability to more clearly convey a message, they are natural “upsellers”.
- Traffic boosting. If proper video SEO best practices are utilized, search engines will return results that include videos because it’s such a popular medium, according to Businessweek.
The Most Advantageous Video SEO Best Practices
- Create a video based on and around your targeted keywords. Though this sounds obvious, it’s quite easy to become side-tracked. Multimedia that stays on message gets more hits, is shared more and commands more credibility.
- Include your keyword(s) in the title tag. If your multimedia is about training service dogs, put that in the title tag for the best results.
- Name your multimedia file descriptively and with keywords. Don’t just upload a video with a file description of “5499wzmt.mp4”.
- Publish a contextual transcript. Because search engines will have limited “knowledge” of what’s contained in a multimedia file, publishing a transcript for crawling and indexing.
- Use a video sitemap. One of the most advantageous video SEO best practices is to include a video sitemap. In fact, even Google recommends this element:
We are starting to look at video sitemaps more and more and I think that if you have a video site and you haven’t made a video sitemap, I would definitely recommend it. …If you make video, if you are a site owner, or a publisher, please start exploring video sitemaps. –Matt Cutts, Google Head Webspam Engineer
Lastly, anotherof many video SEO best practices is to publish your multimedia alone. That is, just one video on a page. This way, the URL is appended directly to a single video. Don’t stick several videos on one page, it will be counterproductive to using it in the first place.
If you’d like to learn more about search engine optimization and using video SEO best practices, then contact us for a free, no-obligation consultation. We’ll be happy to explain how to properly use video and other elements to get your site to rank higher in search results.
