What is good video SEO strategy?
All content producers understand the value of search engine optimization (SEO), especially companies in the media sector. Done well, SEO can account for 20 to 40% of traffic referrals and 70 to 90% of new audience development in a typical month. For video content publishers, SEO is even more critical because the return on investment (ROI) hurdle for multimedia can be significantly higher than text due to upfront production costs. The challenge, however, is that in some ways video SEO is much more difficult than normal site optimization.
So what is required for a good SEO strategy? Basically, the following three ingredients:
- Regular production of high quality and unique content. Google, Yahoo!, Bing, and Ask.com all respond well to content that is unique to a specific subject, original, and high quality. Furthermore, a site that produces new content on a regular basis—daily or weekly—will benefit from frequent visits by the search engine spiders as they crave more content in their indices to keep search results fresh.
- Publishing content in an SEO-friendly manner. Search crawlers are rather limited in how they ingest content. They primarily work with static web pages that are produced with “semantically” relevant HTML, meaning that the page is “discoverable” through inbound links, well-formed and descriptive URLs and titles, and proper HTML pages of at least 200 – 300 words that can be contextually parsed.
- Fostering internal and external links in site content. Content must be findable. Because crawlers discover new content by tracing links that are found on web pages, content must be linked to, generally through site maps and internally published links to content. However, external links from authoritative, third-party sites are the “holy grail” of SEO because they are essentially a vote of confidence from the websphere that the content is of high quality, and are therefore more heavily weighted by search engines.
Applying the above SEO best practices to video content is challenging for two reasons:
1. Lack of text content. Crawlers need text in order to understand context and rank content for relevant keywords. The rule of thumb is that web pages must have 200 – 300 words before Google or Yahoo! can begin to understand context. Since textual metadata for video is typically limited to a short title and description—with the “real content” being trapped inside the video itself—multimedia content is at a severe disadvantage for SEO compared to text content found on most web pages.
2. Use of Flash. As mentioned above, search engines can only aggregate and interpret content published in HTML. Since most video is published in stand-alone Flash applications, the video is invisible to the crawlers. Some content producers have tried to circumvent this by embedding flash players in HTML pages, but the lack of 200 – 300 words of “visible” text and metadata for the video typically renders this approach useless.
The key to video SEO success is to create text metadata for each media asset and to publish the metadata along with the Flash media player in plain HTML documents. This allows crawlers such as Google’s to ingest content as they would any text article without compromising the media consumption experience.
In my experience, the most useful metadata is the text transcript of the video clip itself. It is the perfect textual representation of the video and allows the content to be published like any ordinary text document on a web page. It therefore enables video to compete with other web pages, despite the fact that video content is meant to be consumed in a different manner than text content.
EveryZing’s ezSEARCH plug-in integration with thePlatform’s Player Development Kit (PDK) makes the most of your video’s metadata by running the content of your media publishing system (mps) feed through our speech-to-text translation engine. When your audience does a video keyword search, results appear as thumbnails accompanied by the text snippet in which their search term appears. Read about the how the integration works; it’s a great way to enhance discoverability.
There are, of course, strategies for producing text metadata in automated, cost-effective ways, incorporating the transcript into the user experience for applications such as closed captioning and transcript search, and more advanced video SEO best practices such as site maps and video site maps. I’ll cover these in future posts.
Stephen Baker is the Chief Revenue Officer of EveryZing, Inc., and has been in the search industry for over a decade. Stephen’s roles have included Vice President of AlltheWeb (now part of Yahoo!), General Manager of FAST (now part of Microsoft), and CEO of Search for Reed Business Information.
Comments