of boring viewers and potential customers, most of who are conditioned to digest online video in short bursts. If you have lengthy clips, divide them into shorter episodes that can be posted over multiple weeks or months. Serialized video content also creates opportunities for more detailed tags and annotations, which boost search relevancy and total viewership.
2. Host or post?
Brands that attempt to leverage video content as an SEO strategy are inevitably forced to address the hypermodern “hosting or posting” debate. Is it better to house video content on the company website, or is the brand’s marketing agenda better served by farming video footage out to a third-party site like Vimeo or YouTube? If the primary goal of the video initiative is to drive traffic to the company’s ecommerce site, then hosting is clearly the right choice. However, if the primary motivation behind the creation and distribution of video content is to boost viewership and social media shares, then a combined posting and hosting approach may be the best option. It’s also important to keep in mind that each uploading process is unique. Third party sites don’t require you to include “video” in the title or add a description – steps that are necessary when hosting and indexing clips on your own site.
3.Use keywords strategically.
Google is smart, but it’s not a mind reader or a video decoder. Like nearly every other search engine, Google relies on videos tags and keywords to understand your clip’s content and promote it to users who are conducting targeted online searches. So deciding on a name for your video should be a serious, thoughtful process. Since the video title accounts for half of its Google ranking (along with keywords), the naming process should leverage a string of terms that fully encompasses the video’s content and connects with its intended search audience. But naming isn’t the only place where keywords come into play. In addition to including strategic keywords in the video title, you will also need to dedicate time to other backend video details (e.g. video tags, brief descriptions, URL creation) to optimize the search
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presence of you company’s video content. The more time you devote to the planning process, the more likely it is that your video will be seen by the right eyes (e.g., the musicians watching your promo clip for your store’s selection of rare guitars). Another way to leverage keywords to improve the visibility of video content for third party sites and search engines is to attach a text transcript to your videos. Transcripts not only provide added value for special needs audiences, but also offer Google, YouTube and other sites better access to the video’s content.
4. Update sitemaps to maximize search visibility..
Tagging, keywords and a well-crafted title are all important steps in the process of maximizing the SEO potential of video content. But what many marketers and content creators don’t realize is that, uploading a video to your ecommerce site does not automatically link and index the clip. To maximize the visibility of your newly posted video content to search engines, you may need to perform an additional step. Sitemaps are the tools that ultimately lead the Google spider to discover your video URLs. If you don’t have one in place already, create a video sitemap to allow Google to spider the content throughout search. When adding video URLs to your sitemap,
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