Video Search Engine Optimisation, or VSEO, is the use of video within your search engine campaign, creating another avenue, or route to market, for your brand.
Using Video’s to promote your Online Content
The use of video’s to promote your online content is becoming more and more important, and prevalent, in the expanding world of search engine optimisation. We should be seeing a big boost in VSEO (Video Search Engine Optimisation) in 2009.
With the growth of video portals such as You Tube (www.youtube.com) and multi-submission sites such as Tube Mogul (www.tubemogul.com), it has never been easier to get your videos on the web.
So why should you try and go down the root of selling VSEO to your customers? What is its selling power? Is there more to it that popping your video up on You Tube and hoping for the best? Or do you need to provide your customer with a full blown media centre?
Why use Video SEO?
Video on independent websites seem to be quickly and heavily indexed and ranked by the major search engines.
The increase in ‘universal search’ listings now being provided in the SERPS needs to be taken advantage of. Videos are now listed in the search engine results pages adding valuable links and alternative sources to your brand name and web site.
In June 2008 in the UK, 27 million people watched 3 billion videos online = 118 videos per month per viewer. This is a large audience that is often missed or forgotten about when marketing your product or brand.
Including videos adds additional ways to optimise for your keywords and phrases. By adding content relevant to your keywords and phrases, combined with the related videos, will add weight to your site and its content.
The video content can be duplicated on 3rd party website such as you tube without any duplicate content penalties.
Allows for more text and pages to optimise your keywords and phrases around. Be sure to surround videos with relevant on-page content.
Embedding videos in your site pages is a great way to increase the stickiness factor of your pages, which can increase both traffic and search rankings for a specific page. Videos provide ‘engaging’ content for the user. Google and most search engines use a variety of factors to determine the ranking importance a specific page online, one of which is average visitor session length on a page. Visitor length on a page can be increased by embedding a video. These longer site visits may be interpreted by Google that the page has increased value and in turn may be given a bump that translates into higher search engine rankings.
Choosing a video that is themed to your content and informative can help with the stickiness factor – you need to give the search engines something to crawl. Adding an irrelevant video for the sake of adding a video will just confuse your visitors.
Videos help in adding new, fresh and dynamic content to the site.
It is important get your video content found by the search engines. This can be achieved through the use of sitemaps, RSS and MRSS (Media RSS) feeds. Google has introduced Video Sitemaps that will index the video content. If video files are named correctly this is valuable to the search engines.
Google tips on creating and adding a Video Sitemap
Videos are now listed in the search engine results pages adding valuable links and alternative sources to your brand name and web site.