Optimizing Video for YouTube
Optimization your online video is just as important as optimizing your home page and interior pages on your website. Recently comScore reported in their September 2009 U.S. Search Engine Rankings report, that YouTube is the second-largest search engine, higher than Yahoo or Bing accounting for 3466 mm searches in September 2009, so creating online videos and having them available on YouTube should be part of your online marketing strategy.
I get asked a number of times about adding video to a site, many clients want to stream directly on their own site. This is possible with WordPress and can look really nice and will increase the ‘stickiness’ of your site, keeping people engaged longer. However, to gain any kind of recognition for your video in the search engines they should be on YouTube.
Search Engines are not able to figure out what the video is about unless you tell them, so they are invisible to the search engines. Most online video is converted to a flash video file when it is uploaded and the content within the video is unknown. This affects the ranking of the video.
When you upload to YouTube each video is given it’s own page so it gives you the opportunity to let the search engines know what your video is about.
A recent article from Drew Hubbard on IMedia Connection goes into great detail about optimizing for online video. Briefly his quick tips for optimization include:
- Create a Profile Page
- Include links in profile pages wherever possible
- Include appropriate keywords in the name of the video and use the word ‘video’ when appropriate.
- Write a unique, keyword rich description that includes the url, the url should be at the beginning.
- Provide video transcripts if possible.
- Take advantage of YouTube’s captions and annotation feature by adding notes, subtitles, descriptions, and links directly over the video.
- Tag videos with keywords.
- Encourage participation – using Broadcasting and Sharing.
- Watermark your videos.
- Try to get a compelling thumbnail for your video.
- Take advantage of YouTube Insights. The analytics feature of YouTube.
Read the full article with much more detailed explanations of these 11 tips along with examples of videos that get it right and the mistakes to avoid.
I could not agree with you more about YouTube. I own a web based software called Easy Push Button Traffic that uploads the videos to all the directories for people, but YouTube is the king of them all. I tell my users to do exactly the things you describe here. Good job in explaining it in a way anyone can understand.