We know that video content has far better prominence in search engine listings, and a couple of good quality videos (with innovative content), if promoted well, can generate traffic and affect your websites ranking for your keywords.The main reason for this is the wide popularity of video sites like YouTube, Meta Café and the likes, and search engines showing preference to video content rather than textual content. And yet, there are some important points to consider before you can go ahead and optimize your videos for search engines and promote them.Since universal search started favoring video content, many SEO experts started using videos as a strategy to get quicker rankings for keywords (some even with strong competition) that otherwise would have taken months to achieve, not to mention the hard work involved in optimizing the site, and building links. Now this is not an alternative to building your regular content and links, but rather an additional boost to the existing seo efforts.
A simple method SEO's use is to publish the video on their client's websites and then upload it to sites like YouTube. When a search engine would find the same Meta tags in YouTube, as that of a video hosted on the client's site, it would pass on some link juice immediately, impressing the client to no end to see his video ranked top for his keyword.But keep in mind, video content is treated like any other content as far as search engines go, and things like having your keyword in the Meta tags, Title and the Synopsis is equally important. Since the search engines cannot understand the content of the person speaking in the video, they look into the title, the Meta tags, and synopsis of your video to take clues as to what the video is about. One good idea is to create a text transcript of the conversation of the video on that page as well.
The title of the video needs to be given a lot of prominence! Other than ensuring that your keyword/ keyword phrase is included in the title, you have to create a title that is captivating enough so that users come watch it (and recommend it).Now that you have your videos optimized, the next big question is "where to host your videos"? Well that would depend on what do you want to achieve. If you are looking at increasing the traffic to your website, then it's better to host the video on your website first before submitting to the big video sites. But if your objective is to spread brand awareness and want to create a viral, then you can safely host it on sites like YouTube.Once the optimized video is live, then the next step is to build some links to your video content. You must think the video content you have created is very useful to the users, so why not announce this across social bookmarking sites, and even sites like Twitter. The more users like your video, the more traffic will reach your website.
One word of caution; you could find yourself in a situation where you are battling with your own content. What this means is that if you host a video on your site, and then submit the same video on sites like YouTube with the same title, and Meta tags, you could find yourself competing with YouTube for your keyword. Since YouTube has much more credibility than your site, it could happen that your content gets lost somewhere in search listings. To avoid this you can upload the video with the title and Meta tags around your primary keyword on your site, and then tweak the title and Meta tags of the video around another secondary keyword you want to target before you submit to sites like YouTube.
A lot of automatic video submission software's are becoming popular, and sites like Tube Mughal can submit your video to hundreds of video sites instantaneously. This can be very useful in some campaigns where a viral effect is what your desire. The main problem with automatic submissions is that you cannot control the title, and Meta tags of your submissions, and if you are looking at using video as a tool to boost and increase search rankings, then a more careful strategy needs to be adopted.SEO expert - I hope you have enjoyed this article.
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