Watching videos online is becoming more and more common and it is a lot more engaging than just plain text. Online video is a great way to share a message with your audience. It’s also proving to be a reliable way to boost a website’s Search Engine Optimization (SEO) as well as increase traffic. Video and SEO seem to go hand in hand. Think of all the websites you stumbled upon accidentally because you followed a link from a video someone shared. Even if your video doesn’t go viral, there is still a good chance it can work for you to optimize your website.
Video is a good SEO tool for a number of reasons. The first reason is that thousands of hours of video are watched online by viewers every day. Another reason is that when Google and the other search engines are out there crawling your site they are looking for indicators such as quality, relevance, keyword placement as well as over 200 other indicators. Video and other multimedia add value to those metrics thus improving your rankings in the search results. Imagine! There are over 200 ways, indicators, that you can have displayed and installed in your website that make it ‘search engine preferred’! How many of them do you know?
Truth is, no one knows them all except Google and they aren’t going to give us a check list so that we know them too! But here’s the deal – we do know many more of these indicators than you probably do and continue to learn and apply new ones when we SEO the websites we develop and the ones we’re hired to optimize. The favorable results of increased sales our clients can take to the bank, prove our worth. Not bragging here but worth letting you know, that this is our full time job and we maintain our knowledge base and do everything possible to keep it updated.
Here’s a good example to illustrate one of the indicators Google and other search engines employ: when someone watches a video on your site, their stay on your site is increased. Time spent on a website is read as important indicator for Google and the other search engines. People are often heard boasting about how many ‘hits’, visitors and viewers they have to their website – okay, this is a good thing, now we know that it’s ‘on the road’ but doesn’t it make sense that an even better indicator is that the viewer stay on the site long enough to make a purchase!? That type of site is called in the trade: ‘sticky’. Wouldn’t that indicate to the bots that crawl the web and search and measure these factors, that your website is being ‘hit’, visited for the right reason? That’s called in the trade: relevance. And wouldn’t the most natural conclusion be for just these two indicators, that the content on your site, is in the right place to be seen by the right surfer? It’s simple really, Google is constantly updating their game just as you and I do in our jobs. Their job is to be a ‘good search engine’ and ensure that when someone types in the search bar ‘second hand auto parts’ they don’t end up with one or more of the 10 results on page one of sending them to ‘computer processors’ in China! Or ‘grandma’s cookies, some of which happened to look like Joey’s truck! Relevance…and folks that visit the site find what they need and want.
Another important reason is that people are more likely to link to video content. Page-rank (PR) is another important indicator for Google. Think of all the videos that are shared across social media platforms. Someone linked to them from a website and from then on they were shared. When this is ramped up, it’s called in the trade: viral video. This can produce hundreds even thousands of backlinks to your website thus increasing your PR (placement within the Google search engine).
Think about it, millions of viewers, all over the world, all night & all day, view videos and share them in peer-to-peer, social media platforms including forums – now if you add to that, the unremitting fact, that all research has indicated, viewers prefer to have information about products and services delivered to them in video productions…then why not have professional video production, correctly displayed on your website?! When its plugged in correctly the search engines, chief among them is Google, ‘prefers’ it as content and makes it readily available for the ‘searcher’ to locate it.
How Do You Get Your Video Onto Your Website So That Google Reads It:
When you use a video on your site it is important to use them correctly. The best method of using videos on your site is to take advantage of the new HTML5 video tag. If your website is not coded in HTML5, it is time to upgrade! You will also need to create a video sitemap and submit it to all of the search engines. Be sure not to put all of your videos on the same page. Give each video its own unique URL with its own unique keyword phrase. Google doesn’t know what is in your video, it picks up the relative keywords from the URL you assign the video, the title and description in the video sitemap, and the related content on the page.
Add other related images and content to the page your video is on so Google can see what you video relates to. This ensures that each video is ranked and searched separately based on it’s targeted keywords. For instance if you have a website about cooking with videos of you making chicken you’ll want those videos to be searchable. If someone searches how to make lemon chicken your website may not pop up, but a page with a video would have a better chance of being ranked.
In conclusion, if you really want to pull traffic to your website and sell your products and services by using video productions as content, never use YouTube, Vimeo or Bing to host your videos. Unless your intentions are to increase traffic to their websites and not yours. Don’t spend your time and resources creating a great video only to to drive traffic to someone elses website. It’s just not good business.
Build a good SEM (search engine marketing) strategy and get it doing the heavy lifting for you. Many Webmasters like ourselves, who are hired to not only develop websites, but utilize them as advertising and marketing devices to sell the clients products, are staggered at why anyone wouldn’t have video as an option on the website!?
We all know, and anyone can do the most minimal research and draw the same conclusion – if you get decent, relevant, video production onto a website and plug it into that site correctly, there isn’t a more cost effective way to increase your sales. There just isn’t.
Professional Video productions plus solid search engine optimization is marketing on steroids!
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For the best video production services available. Visit: factandfable.com.