webdev It is an increasingly accepted fact that video is starting to totally dominate the online experience. The advent of increasingly fat broadband pipes around the world and people’s desire to watch rather than read is fuelling this boom. A recent new dimension to this phenomenon is the advent of video SEO – still talked about in hushed tones around many SEO companies, but an area which, if exploited correctly – can greatly add to a corporations marketing mix.
Youtube
The best barometer to give you an appreciation of how big video is online is to use the stats of the biggest online video site – YouTube.
- 60 hours of video are uploaded every minute, or one hour of video is uploaded to YouTube every second.
- Over 4 billion videos are viewed a day
- Over 800 million unique users visit YouTube each month
- Over 3 billion hours of video are watched each month on YouTube
- More video is uploaded to YouTube in one month than the 3 major US networks created in 60 years
*source YouTube 2012
Video SEO
Now most people are aware of the concept of viral videos, where an organisation or person puts up and video which they share amongst their network; which in turn spreads further. Video SEO sounds like it should be the same thing, but in fact it is the process of optimising a video in such a way that it will be spidered and ranked by Google. The video will then appear in the new style of search engine pages which feature video results amongst the normal link results.
Now most would assume that the easiest way of achieving this would be by sticking your video on YouTube (indeed most Google video results tend to be from there) however, as I’ll explain later in this article, that would be fairly pointless in SEO terms.
Google can’t see
Video SEO works in a very similar way to normal SEO, although the content is visual (and Google can’t actually read video) the title, transcription, tags and embedded links can help build your site’s authority to Google – particularly if the video is shared and embedded in other websites across the internet.
Having a series of videos optimised this way with different key terms means that your organisation will be visible visibly (rather than just with a mere text link) across swaths of search results that wouldn’t be possible with traditional SEO.
YouTube is selfish
Going back to YouTube – what is important is to realise that sticking your corporate video onto the site is fine – and you’ll achieve views for your project and it may even go viral – however, from an SEO point of view; YouTube is fairly pointless. This is because even though your YouTube video might be embedded nicely into your site, any link juice from people sharing the video will benefit YouTube, not your site.
We would suggest hosting video content on your own server and using a custom player, to ensure that all the SEO goodness is coming your way – instead of being eaten up by the big dog of web video – YouTube.
