This week’s guest blog post is on SEO for Videos by Lior Levin. If you’re interested in submitting a post to the flyte blog you can do so here.
Being in the SEO business for a while I have learned the techniques of promoting a website from A-Z and yet I still keep learning that SEO is an ever changing field.
Sometime last year I started seeing videos appear in SERP [Search Engine Result Pages] for which my clients were (or wanted) to rank well. Immediately I started to ponder how will I get my clients’ videos to be on the first page?
I have found that you can get your name out there a whole lot faster and easier by pumping out a video rather than spending days or weeks on doing SEO for your site.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that the well-known SEO tasks are not needed for promoting a video in the search engines, but I personally feel that it is a lot easier promoting a YouTube video to the first SERP than a website. It helps too that Google has a soft spot for YouTube videos.
Here are few things to take in mind if you decide to try my theory:
Title
The title is still the be all and end all. It takes a WOW title to grab anyone’s attention. A good title is almost like shouting out in a church when it’s dead silent, as it has to spark the interest of a potential reader.
It has to sum up in a few words what the video is really about. All too often catchy titles are used but they have nothing to do with the video itself, nor the keywords you are promoting. Add your keyword in the title as usual but be sure to keep it informative.
Description & Tags
It’s not that you will just publish your video, add a title and there you have it – your video is in the first page. You have to put in all the meta data, such as tags and a good optimized description.
What you are doing–or should be doing–with the tags is looking at them as being categories. You need to be writing them in such a way that they are descriptive, have a one word impact and do the job of drawing in the reader according to what they are looking for. Don’t forget the tags are basically used for categorization to keep a facsimile of order to information on YouTube.
This is where you can make your description work for you. You have to have a punchy, dynamic, straight to the point description because you only have a small number of words to be able to do it in. This is where many people run into trouble.
It’s not that they can’t be descriptive about their videos, but it’s a matter of describing what the video is about all in one small space and still having my keywords in the text.
Inbound Links
Don’t underestimate the importance of inbound links for videos’ SEO. Google wants to be sure that your videos deserve to be in the first page and they’ll be looking at your current inbound links. If you don’t have any, it might be a problem. Of course, try to get links with the right anchor text.
You need to rethink that videos are a stand alone object that the search engines are just going to grab, and instead look at them as mini-websites. That will change the way you bring traffic to your web site.
Overall the techniques are the same, but you have much less tasks to manage and the competition is much lower. Go try it out.
Lior Levin is a SEO expert working for an online task management tool company and also for a nursing wear brand called Milk Nursingwear.
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