SEO :: How to optimize video files for Google ::
Video OptimizationSo, you’re making a feed or hoping for a spider to come find your videos. Or, you’re uploading and looking for some notice from the masses. Here are some places to include your nicely dressed, keyword-rich messaging (most of these tips apply both for videos on your site and for video uploads): On-page text and links to the video First and foremost, make sure all the videos on your site are presented on individual URLs. Text surrounding the video file, and links pointing to it, give contextual help to search engines, so include keywords there. If you’re going the uploading route, you may not be able to control a great deal of the on-page text for uploaded videos, but you can certainly point keyword-rich links from your site to the pages containing your uploaded videos. Video file name Just like search-friendly URLs for HTML pages, video file names should contain descriptive terms, separated by dashes. Video file metadata Many video-production/encoding tools allow the input of metadata in the video file itself. This can include content-specific elements such as title, description, or even a text transcript, and can also include technical information such as format/encoding quality. If you have control over these elements, be sure to include keywords. Media RSS enclosures Naturally, this applies only if you’re hosting videos on your site, not uploading. Of particular usefulness in SEO are the <title>, <description>, <keyword>, and <text> enclosures in your MRSS feed. We’ve already given you guidelines for title, description, and keywords tags for your web pages in Month One that advice applies to tags that are describing your video content, too! Go back and reread Week 1 for a refresher course in writing good titles and descriptions if you need to. As for the <text> enclosure, that’s a great opportunity to include a full-text transcript of your video, if you can. Audio in the FileThis may sound a bit 2001: Space Odyssey, but some video search engines do use voice recognition as a part of their algorithm. While you probably don’t want to alter your actual video content to include keywords, a voice slate containing target keywords may be a reasonable approach. There’s much more to learn when it comes to video promotion online. Here are a few of our favorite online resources:
We hear a lot of questions about special results within Google. That’s why we decided you should spend a day wrapping your brain around some of the quips and quirks of the world’s favorite search engine. Today, you’ll learn about these features, find out how important they are to you, and arm yourself for future tectonic search-result shifts:
Universal SearchThere are lots of separate specialty search engines, a.k.a. verticals, within Google. Book search, blog search, image search, finance, patents, and so on, can all be accessed and enjoyed on their own happy home pages. But like that high school kid who hangs out with the jocks at lunch and the deadheads after school, Google just loves breaking paradigm. So Google blends its search results, a system that’s modestly titled Universal Search. As you saw earlier this week, Google often displays local, image, and video results within its standard search listings, and you’ve already gotten a great start on optimizing for each of these. Since Universal Search is highly subject to change, we can’t tell you whether tomorrow will bring other results such as blogs, catalogs, and scholarly articles thrown in the mix. So today you’ll search each of your top keywords using any vertical search that is relevant to your organization. Look for a list at google.com/options/. Even if blended results aren’t currently showing up for your target keywords, good ranks within the vertical will have you well placed for any future display tweaks. |
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