Keyword Articles

Video and Search Optimization

As online video content becomes more appealing to search engines in terms of ranking and indexing, I thought it would be helpful to send you a few pointers on how to use online video to your advantage.

In recent years, the search engines (especially Google) have begun to incorporate video into their search results pages.  Google obviously thinks that video will play a very important part in the future of the internet as they paid $1.65 billion to purchase video giant YouTube back in October of 2006.  Many search marketers including myself believe that Google is adding additional weight to video content, therefore ranking videos more highly in their results.

In a recent report Forrester Research's Nate Elliot found that “…On the keywords for which Google offers video results, any given video in the index stands about a 50 times better chance of appearing on the first page of results than any given text page in the index.”

Knowing this before your competitors do is a big advantage.  Being the first to post a how to video on your subject or a video to introduce a new service may bring high rankings swiftly and secure your company a top spot in search results for the keyword phrases that you were not able to rank highly for with text.

Here are five tips that you can use to help boost your videos to the top of search engine results.

1. Be sure your META Tags accurately describe your video and consider using the word video in the title.
2. Fill the page with content that is related to the video or that describes the video.
3. Use h1, h2 & h3 tags on the page to further describe the contents of the video.
4. Name the file using keywords to explain the file’s contents.  You can also name the html page in a similar fashion.
5. If you are posting the video on YouTube you should tag the video with relevant keywords.

These five tips should get you started in utilizing video to improve your website's search rankings. For a more comprehensive list check out the most recent On the Horizon newsletter here.

Horizion Marketing Group is a full-service interactive marketing agency. We can produce your online video content then help you use it to build your internet presence and drive traffic to your website.