Optimizing Video Content
One of the trends that are taking hold in the present marketing industry is online video advertising. This would explain why there there are websites and directories creating video spaces for those users who opt to advertise with videos in the different sites. Youtube is still the most watched video portal online, but many sites are taking advantage of the growing success of video marketing, too.
It seems, though, that optimizing video content has become challenging. This is obvious because search engines crawl for text content more than videos and images. Site owners make it harder when they don’t fully utilize optimization and advertise their video content. Take a look at IYP (Internet Yellow Pages), which is not very successful with promoting their video content. This is because they do not optimize the videos and leave the marketing to the users. Looking at this from a marketer’s point of view, it is clearly a missed opportunity for IYP when it comes to search engine marketing.
Here are some tips from Search Engine Land on optimizing video content:
As stated above, search engines still prioritize crawling over text content more than video content. Websites dealing with video content must optimize the web pages with the title and description of the videos, along with tags. Site maps and directories can also come in handy. Basically, you optimize the page as you would any normal web page with text content.
RSS feeds are a great help for better exposure to the search engine crawlers. New sites can start off with a single video RSS fee for all their video content. They can put it in categories and make specialty feeds when the videos have become numerous and popular.
Automated distribution is a great strategy for search engine marketing. This would especially be helpful for videos because every popular video submission sites are still free.
Include “video” as an indexable tag to the pages to help improve upon the quality of the search results. The search engines will be able to crawl for this keyword and optimize on the video content.
Helping to educate and inform the users on search engine marketing and social marketing also helps not only the users but the site as well. Through this, users can be motivated to distribute and promote video content on search engines social media sites. This way, not only will the users be able to learn, they’ll also be able to refer to the site and help promote it.
