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One area of interest for me in 2014 is video search engine optimization (SEO). In this regard, I’ll be perusing a number of resources like webinars and articles to learn the basics. I figure as long as I’m learning, I might as well share this information with visitors to the Streaming Learning Center; after all, if you care about video, you have to care whether it’s being seen or not. As the title suggests, these are definitely baby steps, and I’m not claiming to be an authority. But if you want to know what I learned, read ahead.
To start at the beginning, Wikipedia defines search engine optimization (SEO) as “the process of affecting the visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine’s “natural” or un-paid (“organic”) search results. In general, the earlier (or higher ranked on the search results page), and more frequently a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine’s users.”
Search engines send web crawlers, or spiders, to extract information from web pages to determine their ranking, with an indexer scanning the data and assigning the rankings. As you probably know, video is a lump of indecipherable data to the search engine indexers that perform this analysis, so, at the very least, you have to surround your video with metadata so the search engine knows what’s in the video. This, and other similar activities, are generally defined as video SEO.
The first resource I’ll write about is an Ooyala webinar entitled Video SEO in a Social and Mobile World. It’s a free webinar that you’ll have to register to see, but that’s it. Here’s what I learned, with a summary on the bottom for those in a hurry.
Contents
Preliminaries
1. To succeed with video, you need great content (and Ooyala has a webinar on that as well).
2. Distribute your video on multiple sites and to all relevant devices. So, be on YouTube, though that’s pretty crowded. For this reason, you should consider social sites like Facebook (#5 video search site), as well as your own website, where you can optimize use within your site. Your video needs to play on all relevant devices, including mobile phones and tablets.
3 Be discoverable; Sites with properly indexed videos are 50 times more likely to be on the front page of search results. This leads us into the next area.
Boosting SEO
There are a number of steps you can take to improve SEO; some direct, some indirect. By direct, I mean activities like submitting a sitemap to each service (more later) and adding metadata to your site. By indirect, I mean activities like promoting social interaction like comments, Tweets and Likes, as well as links, since search engine indexers take these as evidence of the perceived utility of the information on the site.
Here are some of the techniques discussed in the webinar to make your website SEO friendly from a video perspective.
– Create groups of videos on a single page covering a single topic (called an index page). That way, that particular page will be ranged high on the topic. The webinar discussed how Betty Crocker, an Ooyala client, created index pages for topics like birthday cakes, and topics like party planning.
– Add related videos to the content. In addition to the recipes, Betty Crocker added how to videos to some of their index pages, and links to other General Mills products. Note that advertising on the page can reduce search engine rankings.
– Once selected, each video should be viewed on its own unique landing page, not on a page with other videos, or in a pop-up or play-list player, which aren’t ideal for SEO.
Incidentally, if you Google Birthday cake recipes, and search under Videos, Betty Crocker has the top link, and three of the five top ten links, with All Recipes (a personal favorite) grabbing one more of the top ten, and YouTube the remaining six. Whatever Betty Crocker is doing, it appears to be working.
The webinar next related that links and social media are increasingly important to your search engine “authority.” “A search engine cares most about what other people are saying about you and how they link to you.” To improve this area, the webinar recommends promoting social interaction on the site, without going into a lot of details. Presumably, the easiest way to do this is to add buttons for easy tweeting or liking, and a comment section. Other tips:
– Ensure that URL is related to title of the video, and that the video file name is related to the content.
– Last, use H1 and title tags, and add metadata to the page that describes the video. Always use simple terms that are easily understood. Adding captions and a transcript to the page is always advised. Obviously, you always want to make sure that you’re using keywords that are descriptive and relevant to your target viewers (e.g. the terms they use when searching for videos like the ones you are creating).
Now that your website is SEO friendly, you have to expose them to the search engines.
Expose your website.
The webinar then notes that when you use the Flash player, the embed code itself may pass along very little information about the video itself. For example (from me, not in the webinar), a YouTube embed code may look like this:
<object width=”640″ height=”360″ data=”//www.youtube.com/v/PY3esgEGdMo?hl=en_US&version=3&rel=0″ type=”application/x-shockwave-flash”>
<param name=”data” value=”//www.youtube.com/v/PY3esgEGdMo?hl=en_US&version=3&rel=0″ />
<param name=”allowFullScreen” value=”true” />
<param name=”allowscriptaccess” value=”always” />
<param name=”src” value=”//www.youtube.com/v/PY3esgEGdMo?hl=en_US&version=3&rel=0″ />
<param name=”allowfullscreen” value=”true” />
</object>
This particular YouTube video is for a webinar I gave on setting bitrate control and keyframe settings, but the embed code doesn’t indicate this, so provides no value from an SEO perspective. There are many ways to make embed codes more SEO friendly, which Ooyala claims to do, though the webinar didn’t specify how they did it or what their final embed code looks like. The bottom line is that if your embed code is SEO friendly, it will pass along metadata that web crawlers can recognize, increasing the amount of data that the indexer knows about your site.
The webinar doesn’t discuss what happens if that metadata is already in the page header or other tags. Since an indexer scans the entire page, rather than just the embed code, I couldn’t tell how critical this element is. For example, if you Google “setting bitrate controls and keyframe settings,” my website does appear third, since the metadata was available elsewhere in the page. Would ranking have been better if the same info was in the embed code? I don’t know, but I guess working under the assumption that more is better is probably the best approach.
Site Maps and MRSS Feeds
Once you have video on your website, you can either wait for the search engines to scan the site, or submit the updated information via sitemaps or MRSS feeds. This is particularly important with timely content. Ooyala lets you generate sites and MRSS feeds to accelerate this process.
I’m pretty dumb on site maps and MRSS feeds, and I’ll focus on these topics over the next few weeks.
Analytics
The webinar concludes by indicating that you need analytics to determine if your video SEO efforts are working.
The Net Net
There are lots of individual steps defined above to improve your search engine visibility, some simple, some not. These include:
– Produce high quality videos.
– Distribute them widely and make them playable on all relevant platforms.
– On your website, insert each video in a unique viewing page; don’t use pop up or playlist players.
– Incorporate social media links and comments on the viewing page. Do what you can to encourage interaction with the video.
– Ensure that URL is related to title of the video, and that the video file name is related to the content.
– Use H1 and title tags, and add metadata to the page that describes the video. Always use simple terms that are easily understood. Include captions and transcripts on the page when possible. Obviously, you always want to make sure that you’re using keywords that are descriptive and relevant to your target viewers (e.g. the terms they use when searching for videos like the ones you are creating).
– Use a search engine friendly embed code.
– If you’re in a hurry, and don’t want to wait until the search engine finds you, submit a sitemap or create an MRSS feed to submit to the search engines.
Note that though the Ooyala webinar is billed for 30 minutes, the presentation portion that I covered only took eight, so is well worth watching.
And hey, if you liked what you read, please Like or Tweet up top or add a comment below. I hear it can do wonders for a page’s SEO. 🙂
