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David Deutsch, head of SEO for Fortune Cookie, explains how video can help boost your website’s ranking
This month’s recommended… Video resources
Optimising SEO with video With more than 95 per cent of the UK having broadband in their homes, video usage is on the rise. Most people prefer watching video to reading loads of text if they’re given the option, and it’s no surprise that YouTube is ranked as the third most popular site in the world by Alexa. Anticipating the need to find great videos online, Google, Yahoo and Bing have created video search engines. These scour the internet for unique video content and publish it in their video sections. The cool part about this is that, instead of posting normal text listings, the search engines publish thumbnail screenshots of the videos on the search engine results page (SERP). The thumbnail enables searchers to see what kind of video they’re dealing with before viewing it. Universal Search – a system that blends image, video, news, blog, local and traditional search to form a more complete experience for users – is now integral to all three major search engines. And listings that have video thumbnails
Name Vimeo URL vimeo.com Info Vimeo was created by filmmakers and video creators who wanted to share their work; now it’s a video community. Videos on the site are picked up by all three search engines.
next to them have been proven to receive a much higher click-through rate than traditional text listings. A recent eye-tracking study performed by Fortune Cookie (www.fortunecookie.co.uk) found that people are automatically attracted to video thumbnails on the SERP and even skip listings above and below them entirely. This means that listings with video thumbnails not only get more attention but they even cause other surrounding listings to be ignored by the user. The benefits of having video on each searchoptimised page of a site are clear. Google, Yahoo and Bing all take video very seriously because they know that searchers prefer audio-visual content to simple text and images. Having video on a page definitely gives it a little spice. Below, we’ll look at how to make sure your video gets thumbnailed on the main search engines. See the recommended resources on the right for more information about video. ●
Name Dailymotion URL dailymotion.com Info Dailymotion is about finding new ways to see, share and engage your world. It was one of the first sites after YouTube to optimise its pages for universal search. Name VidSeo URL vidseo.co.uk Info VidSeo is a company specialising in online video production and execution. It will shoot, edit and send you 60-second videos to publish on your site.
How to… Get your website’s video on the search engines Name David Deutsch Job title Head of SEO Company Fortune Cookie URL fortunecookie.co.uk
Reasons to optimise a site for video include both increased brand awareness on the SERP and higher click-through rates from existing search listings. If your page is already in position one for a keyword, that listing will earn a thumbnail once you’ve optimised it for video. You’ll also get increased time on site and page views, plus better user experience and increased conversion rates. So how can you get your pages listed with video thumbnails?
110 .net october 2010
1 First, embed your web-friendly video on the page using any of the many video embed methods. For example, you could use Flash, Windows Player, QuickTime and so on. Note: do not use YouTube, Vimeo or other video upload sites for this. The video must be unique to your website. 2 Create a thumbnail of the video for indexing, with a size of 80x60 pixels.
3 Next, you need to create four meta tags for the video on the page, like this: <meta name="medium" content="video" /> <meta name="video_ type" content= "application/xshockwave-flash" /> Replace application/xshockwave-flash with the player you’re using. <meta name="video_ height" content="280" />
Replace 280 with the height of your video. <meta name="video_ width” content="460" /> Replace 460 with the width of your video. 4 Create a video sitemap and submit it to the search engines. Google and Yahoo have clear instructions at bit.ly/avLLvs and bit.ly/dBnUm3. Bing doesn’t have a video submission process, so
submit your sitemap directly to Bing (bit.ly/ 4ACvdG) and include the meta tags from step 3. You’ll soon start to see your search engine listings take on a whole new look. ●
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