Finance & Marketing

People usually love video, millions of Americans consume videos online and same is the case world over. A consumer is most likely to keep in mind and refer to a video in comparison to a print advertisement. These days video making is very economical as compared to the cost of a traditional commercial. Broadband is getting enormous popularity worldwide. Now people can watch videos without long download times or quality issues. Present generation considers video to be a reliable source of news and information. Online video for them is second to nature. Here are a few tips/hints for optimizing your video:

1) All SEO specialists know that the search engines are built to index and rank text. Being that it is more difficult for the search engines to understand the content within a video (though they are working on it), it is a good idea to include as much text surrounding the video itself if possible. One excellent way to do this is to include a text transcript of your video alongside your video with keyword rich title and descriptions.

2) Make sure to include the keyword that you are targeting visitors for. Most often users will use the word “video” in conjunction with their search if searching for videos via the search engines. Therefore, it is important to use the word “video in your title, description, meta tags, and any other on-page text that you include with your video.

3) Off-page SEO, or, the techniques that one uses outside of the actual coding of the site itself (links, etc…), is just as effective for online video content as it is with any other webpage. Therefore, do your best to develop inbound links to your videos with the keywords that you are targeting in the anchor text of those links.

4) Video sitemaps are a great way for you to tell the search engines where all of your video content resides. With video sitemaps, you make it much easier for search engines to discover and index your online video in a rapid manner.

5) When hosting video content on your own, keep in mind that flash is next to impossible for search engines to read and understand. Try to work with a format that is not flash. However, the simplest way to enable video on your site is via the popular flash players. That being said, do your best to take advantage of the other tips for SEO so that search engines can easily understand what it is your video is about.

6) It is advisable to optimize the URLs of your video pages for the search engines with the help of mod_rewrite function so that the pages are freely assessable by the search engines.

7) Various video search engines use to capture thumbnails of your in different manner. Some of them take the first frame of your video, while others try to take from the middle or end. It is better to experiment with each site individually to make sure they are displaying the right thumbnail for your video. A video thumbnail is always crucial when it comes to decide for a viewer which video to watch.

When hosting videos on your own site, keep your videos one per page and put all the pages with videos into one directory. This combined with a video sitemap will help search engines find and index all of your important videos.

In addition to the specific optimization techniques listed above, make sure that you also follow some common guidelines for online video content:

9) Keyword research, as with search engine optimization for other online content, is crucial for targeting the audience you desire most effectively. Use keyword research tools available in order to identify those words that most often are searched for when searching for related content online.

10) Enable ratings, reviews, comments, and feedback on your videos. Research shows that allowing users to provide feedback results in greater views for your video in addition to the fact that users who provide feedback tend to be those users that act.