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Video distribution

Posted by Ian Macfarlane June 3rd, 2010

Now that you know how to optimise your videos for search it’s time to distribute them across the web.

Following from last week’s post about video SEO, this week’s post covers how to distribute your videos across the web and track their performance.

Whilst you can host video files on your own site and submit them to video search engines (Google, Yahoo!, Bing, Blinkx etc.), YouTube is the 800 lb gorilla in the video space. The only way in which your video will be found by people searching on the YouTube website is if you upload the video to YouTube itself.

Using YouTube also has additional benefits – YouTube automatically creates Media RSS feeds, which you can use to submit the video to search engines, and it also makes hosting of videos effectively “free”. However, the Media RSS feeds that YouTube provides link back to the YouTube page, not to the page on your site.

Therefore, we recommend hosting your videos on your own site as well as on YouTube. You can then generate your own Media RSS feeds (linking back to your site) and submit these feeds, rather than the YouTube feeds, to the various video search engines. If hosting videos on your own site, it may also be useful to provide the video content in multiple formats – the more formats in which the video is available, the larger the potential audience (although more formats also means additional costs in both time and bandwidth, so there is a definite trade-off involved).

It may be worth uploading the video to other video hosting platforms, such as Dailymotion, MetaCafe or Vimeo, as well as to YouTube.

When uploading your video to video hosting sites like these (as opposed to submitting it to video search engines), we recommend watermarking the video with the brand name to prevent it from being re-used without attribution.

Most video hosting sites allow you to include a URL along with each video – each video that you upload to a third-party site should ideally link back to the page on your site on which the video is hosted.

It is also a good idea to embed the URL of the page on your site where the video file is included within the video itself. Short URLs are generally better, as users will have to manually type them in. URL shortening services which support tracking of users are particular useful here: they can allow you to track users who visit your site after watching one of your videos, and identify which of your videos and which video hosting sites are attracting the most visitors.

Tags: best practice, Google, search, SEO, video

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Video Optimisation

Posted by Rik Stewart May 28th, 2010

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

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Why use a hierarchical, hyphenated URL structure?

Posted by Rik Stewart May 10th, 2010

Continuing our series of frequently asked questions, this article looks at URL structure with regard to SEO.

The specific question that we were asked was “How will implementing a hierarchical, hyphenated URL structure improve search results?”

This is something which we would recommend if the existing URL structure was detrimental to usability and search.

http://www.stewartsgroceryanddairy.co.uk/department -9/category-122/?id=3242234

The above URL contains a number of elements which could be seen as search unfriendly.

• The domain name itself is difficult to read, for both search engine and user.
• The sub-folders relay no useful information to search engines or users.
• The parameters at the end are meaningless.

A search friendly URL is meaningful to users and search engines alike.

A search friendly URL

Ideally, a URL should make sense to both searchers and search engine spiders.  This can be achieved by having a hierarchically structured website.  For example, a page about English cheddar on a grocery site might have the URL:

http://www.stewarts-grocery.co.uk/dairy/cheese/english-cheddar/

Here, the URL for a page for English cheddar cheese has a good domain name, which includes the brand and a keyword pertaining to the type of business, and the rest of the path is broken down into a logical folder structure.

Another point to note is that some search engines do not like very deep hierarchies. For example, Bing’s recommendation is to keep depth to 4 subdirectories from the root. Yahoo! has also published similar advice.  Our advice would be to keep the number of subdirectories down where possible.  Another reason to keep the number of directories down is that there is evidence to suggest that ” a searcher is twice as likely to click a short URL than they are to click a long URL.”

Compound Words

The above URL could equally have been written as:

http://www.stewarts-grocery.co.uk/diary/ englishcheddarcheese.html

or

http://www.stewarts-grocery.co.uk/diary/ english_cheddar_cheese.html

Both are valid URLs.  The problem with the first example is that search engines may see the nonsense word “englishcheddarcheese” rather than the phrase “english cheddar cheese”.   While the search engines are getting better at picking individual words out of such compound words, they are by no means perfect, and we recommend using word separators rather than leaving this to chance.

Using underscores as word separators can have a similar effect. Search engines may see the use of underscores as a way of joining words together rather than separating them, so the second example above would be seen as the nonsense word “english_cheddar_cheese”, rather than “english cheddar cheese”.  Another problem with underscores is that they can be hidden by underlining, as in the following example

http://www.stewarts-grocery.co.uk/diary/ double_gloucester_cheese.html

This can lead to confusion when reading the URL from a printed document; it is difficult to tell if the above is “double_gloucester_cheese” or “double gloucester cheese”.

Google’s Matt Cutts did, however, say at WordCamp 2007 that Google was looking into treating underscores as word separators (this was misreported at the time, as underscores were now ok to use as word separators) .   Bing has also recommended not using underscores.

Implementing a hierarchical, hyphenated URL structure has many benefits, both for search (easier for the search engine algorithms to ascertain the purpose of the page) and usability (easier for users to read, making it more likely for them to click through from the search results).

Tags: best practice, hierarchical structure, url

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Dissecting the URL

Posted by Rik Stewart May 7th, 2010

Often, marketing clients have a deep understanding of their own businesses, route to market and campaign targets, but aren’t necessarily experts in the field of digital. Some of the more staple elements of the online world require an explanation to assist in interpreting reports and campaign documentation. This article explains the URL and the nomenclature of its various components.

Using as an example, Http (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol) is the standard protocol used by most web pages. The other common protocol used is Https, which is used for secure connections. The colon is used as a separator and the double slash // is the instruction for making a connection to a server.

The www.example.com is the domain name, but it may also be called the hostname when associated with an IP address. The www part is an optional subdomain, while .com is the TLD (Top Level Domain). It should be noted that example.com (without the www) is also a domain name and similarly, if an IP address is associated with it, it can also be a host name.

The next part after the colon is the port number (80, in the example above). Port 80 is the default port for http and is rarely seen as most browsers don’t display it.

In the above example, /media represents the path. In situations in which there is no path, the slash would indicate the root of the domain. In many URLs, the last part is followed by a further / and then a file name: index.html, index.htm, default.html and index.php being four common examples.

A URL can also include sub directories: in the above example, /media/ is the sub directory.

The URL in the example contains one last section, ?id=647386768. This is a URL parameter and may well mean that the URL is dynamic, that is to say, it is generated by code (often from a content management system). Dynamic URLs can be problematical from a SEO point of view. The parameter here also uses the id=. Using the id= (or sid=) parameter is not recommended, as some search engines can construe this as denoting a session id and may not fully spider the URL. When it comes to using dynamic pages Google has offered the following: advice

“If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a "?" character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few.”

You will, on occasions, see URLs like the following:

http://www.example.com/reptiles.html#terrapins

Here, the # denotes a “named anchor” which is in effect a place holder on a page. These are especially useful in long html pages when you want to link to a specific part of a page. Search engines do not follow these. As AJAX pages sometimes use the # as part of the URL structure, this can render them uncrawlable. However, Google has mentioned that it is working on crawling AJAX pages and has proposed a technique for creating search friendly AJAX pages.

Tags: best practice, SEO, technical

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