In this post in our series covering frequently asked questions, we are going to look at optimising video for search.
Faster internet connections have meant that video is a viable option everywhere on the web.
The top three search engines all now include video as part of their main results. Including video can benefit a website and its users in a variety of ways.
However, for video to be effective from an SEO point of view, it needs to be correctly optimised for search. Video content, like images, cannot be “seen” by search engine spiders. Therefore, if a video contains information that is important for the ranking of the page, your site needs to be optimised to point the search engines to the video content. This, in turn, will make it easier for users to find your video in the search engines.
Ideally, before you even make the video, you should make a list of the keywords that you want to target. The video meta data should target these keywords and, at the very least, the title, description, keywords, category, duration and a suitable thumbnail should be included.
There are two main types of meta data that can be employed: XML feeds and HTML markup.
For XML feeds, we generally recommend using Media RSS rather than Video Sitemaps, as the Media RSS format is more widely supported.
For HTML markup you can use either the Facebook Share format or the SearchMonkey RDFa format. The advantage of using HTML markup is that it may result in your site getting enhanced snippets in the search engines. However, we recommend using both an XML format and an HTML format, as different web services will support different formats.
Each video should have its own page, which should be optimised for keywords relating to the video. This would include titles, headings and meta data. We also recommend adding a summary of the video, which includes these keywords. Both the URL of the page embedding the video and the video file itself should be descriptive and should also include the most important keywords. Another useful addition is a video transcript, which is beneficial for both accessibility and SEO. This transcript can be included on the page in which the video is embedded, in addition to (or in place of) the summary.
The length of the video can also be very important. Short videos are generally better received than long videos. If a longer video is necessary, consider breaking it up into multiple smaller clips or episodes. This will work better for some videos than others – you don’t want to break up a feature film, but creating a series of informational videos that each answer a different question well is often better than creating a long sprawling video about the entire topic. Web users are known not to be very patient when waiting for videos to buffer. In fact, research by TubeMogul showed that 81% of online video viewers clicked away if a clip rebuffered, so shorter segments are more likely to be watched.
The final important issues to consider are how to host and distribute your online video – we will cover these topics in a separate article next week.
Tags: best practice, meta tags, microformats, search, SEO, video