Thanks to Guest Blogger Brain Braker of MB Consulting.
Today, video has become an essential component for achieving effective search engine rankings. If you want to ensure strong results for your company, video is a proven path to doing so. Clearly, Google has begun to emphasize and favor those Web sites that implement video in their content.
This change presents a wonderful opportunity for companies that are taking advantage and implementing video. Because they may not know how to execute video correctly, there are few businesses that are really capitalizing on this newly emerging market. Therefore, you can give your business a sharp edge by jumping on the video bandwagon now while there is less competition.
If your site isn’t ranking well, consider implementing video as a tool to boost your search engine rankings.
Include Video On Your Site
Forrester Research reported that videos were 50 times more likely than traditional text web pages to receive an organic first-page ranking. With this statistic in mind, now is the time for you to develop a video search engine optimization (SEO) strategy or risk your competitors doing it first.
Video SEO is a process, a set of techniques designed to make sure Google finds your video content, indexes the pages the content is on, and displays that video content with very specific keywords.
Create Videos That Attract Your Target Market
At MB Consulting, we suggest you avoid creating a video that tries too hard to sell!
Instead, focus on developing content that engages your target market and motivates them to write a comment or share it with others. We’ve had great success with videos that teach, inform or educate. For instance, one of our clients is a dry cleaning company. We created a series of short videos for them that discussed tips on how to remove stubborn stains. Over the next 90 days quality traffic increased over %40 and we gained valuable backlinks. So our Video SEO Strategy achieved the goals we set for the client.
With today’s technology, you can shoot simple videos on your own. However, if you need assistance, hire a professional to help you. He/she can shoot 3 or 4 videos in one session so it’s a cost-effective investment for your business.
4 Ways to Optimize Your Video for the Search Engines
#1. Create a video sitemap. You may have heard of site maps with regard to Web sites. Well, videos also have site maps and contain vital information about your video content. To learn more about Google video site maps, go to http://www.google.com/webmasters/videositemaps/
If you’re unfamiliar with video sitemaps, you can find a free tool to help you generate them at http://www.video-sitemap.org/
#2. Incorporate keywords. Just as you would optimize your Web site content for keywords, you should do the same with your video. Here are 4 places where you should be sure to include keywords phrases:
• The file name of your video on your site
• The title of your video
• The description of your video
• Keyword-rich captions and annotations in
#3. Embed videos into relevant Web pages on your site and make sure the content on those pages is optimized to ensure that the search engines index what your videos are about.
#4. Create a video library on your site so that Google knows where to find your video content and index them. Write keyword-rich annotations for each video in the library along with a separate HTML web page for every available video file. Finally, create a link to the video and files and streaming media player.
The advantage small business owners have by utilizing video is that Google does not look at the age of your site, backlinks, how many pages, or any of the other traditional SEO factors that come into play under text-normal search. Whether you’re a new site owner or a small business owner, this gives you the opportunity to compete with bigger or more traditional websites. As of now, the rules that apply to traditional SEO do not yet apply to video.
Are you incorporating video on your Web site yet? What tips do you have for making the most of this engaging and valuable online tool? Please share your comments below.
Brian Braker is the Director of Social Media/Sales for MB Consulting, a Digital Media Agency. In addition to providing professional SEO services, they help you produce low-cost, high quality web videos that are optimized for the search engines. For more information about MB Consulting, visit their web site at http://www.mbconsultingnj.com
