Streaming Video SEO

These days, SEO has become such a key word (no pun intended!) that everyone knows about Search Engine Optimization. In short, it is the process via which people can find the pages of your site when typing in your key words (or, more accurately, key phrases).

But with the explosion of videos on the Web, and their inherent effectiveness in presenting your product or service, search engines have now begun to deliver video clips in response to user searches. This article gives you a list of ways to make your videos found more easily.

1) Get Inbound Links
The more good, on-topic links going to your videos from other sites, the more value search engines will place on these. A good place to start is social media (facebook, twitter, blogs, etc.)

2) Create SEO-Friendly URLs
One way you can do this is to use the mod_rewrite function.

3) Write Transcripts
Though these may be time-consuming to produce, they can be useful not only for SEO, but for users as well. Be sure to include relevant titles, as well as a summary paragraph that describes the clip. Last but not least, publish the transcript.

4) Organize
If possible, put all your videos in one folder, and don’t display more than one per page.

5) Use Video Meta Tags
Write titles, keywords, and descriptions for each video. Also, be sure to include the word “video” in each of these areas.

6) Check Keywords
Look at your stats to see if people are finding your videos through search engines. If not, try an online tool like WordTracker to find more popular terms, and change yours.

7) Build Sitemaps
Put all of your videos into your sitemap, and be sure that the search engines are indexing (and updating) that sitemap.

8) Check the Thumbnail
Search for your video, and see what frame the search engines are grabbing. Could be the first one, or one from the middle. You may want to adjust your clip so the thumbnail is one you like.

9) Avoid Flash
Since Flash is quickly becoming one of the most popular video formats on the Web, this poses a dilemma. Two possible solutions are: 1) offer an alternate format version which gets indexed; or 2) Use coding features to make your video accessible.

10) Use Feedback
Allowing users to submit comments. Beside helping your SEO, it will also make the videos more interactive, and therefore more effective.