Good video content is often the difference between blogs that stand out and those that don’t. You can use video to add a more human face to your content, or you can use it to explain tasks that words do not easily describe. Video makes your content more clear, more likable, more trustworthy, and therefore much more linkworthy.
There is a lot of evidence that video presentations sell products better than the standard sales letter. People are getting tired of gimmicks. They want to know more about who they are buying from, especially online. If you aren’t using video on your website, your brand could be at a disadvantage.
No matter how much time you put into your video content, it wont get found if you put a barrier between yourself and the search engines. Many bloggers think they only need to put their videos on the web, and the rest will sort itself out. It’s going to take a lot more than that. Here’s what you need to do.
Written Content Is King. You Still Need To Write Articles.
Despite all the technological advances we’ve seen in the past few years, Google still doesn’t know what to do with video content. When Google’s search engine spider crawls your website, it only notices the presence of video. It doesn’t know what’s in the video because that would require too much work.
Instead of going through the extremely difficult task of figuring out what your video is about by “watching” it, Google’s spider reads the written content surrounding your video. This is the easy thing to do, especially when Google’s servers are busy crawling and indexing billions of sites daily. Will Google eventually make sense of video content by analyzing the videos themselves? Maybe… but I wouldn’t bet on it anytime soon.
The most successful video blogs are not just “video blogs.” They are blogs with video. If you want your video content to be found, it should always be surrounded by a nice well-written article. It has long been known that Google gives extra “weight” to pages with more written content. The more words you place around your video, the better it will appear in Google’s eyes.
What You Need To Know About YouTube, Vimeo, And Other Video Hosting Sites.
Believe it or not, video hosting sites want your video content to be found too. Thats why they allow you to add tags and write a nice long description for every video you upload. Whenever you add videos to social media sites, take the time to tag them for the keywords you want to be found under. It will improve your traffic more than you think.
You should also write a description that sells your video to potential viewers. It should read like a mini-advertisement. Don’t worry too much about keywords when you do this. Just remember to include hooks and calls to action that will get people to click on the link.
Let’s use this video as an example:
“Are search engines finding your videos? In this short and simple tutorial, I’ll show you a few little known tricks that will help your videos get a better rank on Google and other search engines. You’ll learn why it’s important to embed your videos in written content, the purpose of tags, and how to use social media to get more views.”
It takes time to write a description like this. I spent about 20 minutes. Many people like to breeze on through when they upload videos to YouTube, but it’s not wise. It’s just like putting a product on sale and having no signage. You’ve already gone through the trouble of putting up the content. The least you can do is advertise it.
This is a point that doesn’t just apply to SEO for video content. It applies to SEO in general. Website owners often forget to use their META description tags properly. These are the short descriptions that appear in Google’s search engine listings under your link. If they don’t read like an advertisement, people won’t click through.
A Final Note About Keywords
It’s always important to do keyword research, but some people go overboard with it. Don’t worry about “keyword density” or any of the other phony metrics. If you want to rank for a particular keyword, put it in your tags when you upload to YouTube and include it once in the header or a sub-heading. That ought to be enough to give your keyword more “weight” when Google’s search engine spider comes around.
I have said it before, and I will say it again. The best SEO strategy is no SEO strategy. It’s all in the content. As long as your content is accessible, and you give it the polish with a good sales pitch, people will share it. You don’t become a YouTube star by worrying about how many times you’re repeating certain words in your description. You become a star because your videos are amazing. Especially this one.