Video SEO for People Who Don’t Know SEO

Video SEO is a topic that only has two groups of people involved with it: people who are experts, and people who are kind of confused about the whole idea. This post isn’t for you experts.

Video SEO is great SEO because it has

• Low competition
• High traffic
• Excellent staying power
• A good chance to go viral

When you do a Google search these days, quite often you’ll see video results built right into the SERPs. YouTube, sure, but also Vimeo and other smaller video portals show up quite regularly. That’s because there’s demand for interesting search results, and videos tend to be more interesting than text, plain and simple. Also, with many people browsing from mobile devices these days, the demand is even higher, because watching a video on your iPhone is much easier than reading that tiny little text, Retina display or no.

At the same time, you may also notice that, even for high-competition keywords, the video results can be a bit lackluster. That’s because, by and large, video SEO isn’t terribly well exploited compared to text-based SEO, because videos are so much harder to create.

But how do you optimize a video? Spiders are used to crawling text, and you don’t have to be an SEO specialist to understand that the more you talk about a subject in your text, the higher Google will rank you for that subject. Videos, however, can’t be parsed in the same way — which is why Google came up with the idea of putting Meta information on a video. A videos Meta information consists of:

• It’s title
• The Description tag (155-ish characters summarizing the video)

Both of these things are critical for telling Google what a video is about. Naming your video “Video_124098.mp4” just doesn’t have the SEO value that “Betta Fish Kills A Water Snail.mp4” does.

The rest of video optimization is equally straightforward: is has to do with the video’s reception wherever it’s hosted. Yeah, you don’t want to put a video straight onto your website — you want it on YouTube, and then embedded in your website. That’s because Google respects videos that get views, comments, and ratings, and embeds on other websites. Make that happen, and your video will give your website a nice big bump up in the SERPS — mission accomplished.