The use of video’s to promote your online content is becoming more and more important, and prevalent, in the expanding world of search engine optimisation. We should be seeing a big boost in VSEO (Video Search Engine Optimisation) in 2009. With the growth of video portals such as You Tube (www.youtube.com) and multi-submission sites such as Tube Mogul (www.tubemogul.com), it has never been easier to get your videos on the web. So why should you try and go down the root of selling VSEO to your customers? What is its selling power? Is there more to it that popping your video up on You Tube and hoping for the best? Or do you need to provide your customer with a full blown media centre?

Why use Video SEO?

1. Video on independent websites seem to be quickly and heavily indexed and ranked by the major search engines.
2. Including videos adds additional ways to optimise for your keywords and phrases. By adding content relevant to your keywords and phrases, combined with the related videos, will add weight to your site and its content.
3. The video content can be duplicated on 3rd party website such as you tube without any duplicate content penalties.
4. Allows for more text and pages to optimise your keywords and phrases around. Be sure to surround videos with relevant on-page content.
5. Embedding videos in your site pages is a great way to increase the stickiness factor of your pages, which can increase both traffic and search rankings for a specific page. Google and most search engines use a variety of factors to determine the ranking importance a specific page online, one of which is average visitor session length on a page. Visitor length on a page can be increased by embedding a video. These longer site visits may be interpreted by Google that the page has increased value and in turn may be given a bump that translates into higher search engine rankings.
6. Choosing a video that is themed to your content and informative can help with the stickiness factor – you need to give the search engines something to crawl. Adding an irrelevant video for the sake of adding a video will just confuse your visitors.
7. Videos help in adding new, fresh and dynamic content to the site.
8. It is important get your video content found by the search engines. This can be achieved through the use of sitemaps, RSS and MRSS (Media RSS) feeds. Google has introduced Video Sitemaps that will index the video content. If video files are named correctly this is valuable to the search engines. Click here to see Google tips on creating and adding a video sitemap: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/topic.py?topic=10079
9. Videos are now listed in the search engine results pages adding valuable links and alternative sources to your brand name and web site.

Tips for implementing Video SEO

1. File Names - Give the video file a catchy and relevant name that is related to your keyword or phrase. Once you have uploaded your video sitemap there is added opportunity for these keywords and phrases to be found and indexed by the search engines.
2. Meta Data - Add meta data to your video files. Again, use relevant meta data, like you would when you are carrying out other Search engine optimisation campaigns.
3. Transcripts - Transcripts of the video will add credible content to the page and give the spiders relevant information to crawl. The transcript should make reference to keywords, relevant content and your brand.
4. Outbound Linking - If you add video content to other sites such as You Tube, make sure that you avail of their ability to link back to your own site.
5. Video Length - Add shorter videos to keep your audience interested. If your video is quite lengthy, consider breaking it down into smaller chunks. This will also give more quality video content to optimise.
6. Branding – Have your branding displayed in your video to enhance your brand awareness.
7. Inbound Linking – link your videos to important keywords throughout your site to enhance their value.
8. Rating – allow users / visitors to rate your video


What can you provide to your customer to boost your sales and in turn boost their rankings?

The first step is getting your client to see the value in undertaking Video Search Engine Optimisation. Using the information supplied in this document you should be able to present a fairly strong case to your client. You will also need to provide them with a viable strategy that will get their rankings up. For a simple solution, you can offer to add content to video sites, implementing the tips outlined above.
Another option is to provide them with a video library on their site that will have separate pages for the individual videos. This will allow you to add valuable content and meta data, plus the ability to link to these pages from within your site.

By Caroline Rodgers,Biznet IIS. Caroline Rodgers, SEO Executive, Biznet IIS, Belfast, Northern Ireland.

charlie writes: Great post. Website optimisation is a powerful technique that many neglect.
Using video to promote products and services really does work. We find companies are waking up to video on the web and are starting to budget for video’s aimed purely for the Web, instead of just putting any old corporate video up there. If you want to make sales via your web site, Video is a MUST have

19:55:05 Mon Jun 29 2009 CDT


Andrew Mooers writes: Have made over 300 videos and in promoting Maine, selling & showing real estate of all types video is big and easy to upload to the slew of options out there. Good article to study!

12:07:43 Fri Feb 20 2009 CST


Nitin Pal writes: Thanks,
For Sharing this info,
This is nice Article , and 100% relavent to this VSEO Topic.

Nitin Pal
http://www.maxeweb.com
+91-9891927751

1:24:02 Tue Dec 23 2008 CST


MorePro SEO writes: This is a great summary of the video optimization theory, but does anyone know of good resources to find out how to optimize the Meta Data, for instance?

Also, how important is the transcript of the video - are the engines able to effectively analyze everything that is said? Or was the reference to the transcript simply suggesting to add the transcript to the video "info" section manually?

Any additional info on this topic is greatly appreciated.

15:29:32 Mon Dec 22 2008 CST


Vanessa writes: This is a good list of all the ways to make the most out of getting traffic and relevance out of video. Good reference for the upcoming year.

8:41:55 Sun Dec 21 2008 CST


Poseidon writes: Search Engine Optimization is turning into like Video Search Engine Optimization recently....am i right?

7:47:07 Sat Dec 20 2008 CST


umed writes: its really great article it will very beneficial for further coming SEO techniques.

0:06:47 Sat Dec 20 2008 CST


ForestWander writes: Great Article.

I have been using video for a while now.

It has dramatically helped my nature photography website.

I love nature photography and sharing pictures and it was reall hard to express what I was seeing in just pictures, but once I started using video it helped my visitors to enjoy the nature that I see on my adventures.

Good article

22:49:19 Fri Dec 19 2008 CST


Dorothy writes: Video has been amazingly helpful. I have conducted many experiments with it and I am so happy to have such great results. I love that the results are immediate! I Highly recommend it!

17:12:18 Fri Dec 19 2008 CST


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