Just as with your photographs and pictures (photos and pics), most search engines have not been able to search WITHIN the video files for people (face recognition), text, and audio (voice recognition). And for that reason, search engines rely on the associated meta information of the video as well as on page text that relates.
Here are some tactics to video search engine optimization:
- Put each video on a single, optimized page so that the video and the on-page text complement each other and are keyword rich.
- Make sure the video itself has a filename that contains keywords. If it’s a video about Mickey Mouse, do not label it video0001.wmv, but instead use keywords like mickey-mouse-video.wmv.
- Use the video throughout the meta information of the video, as many searchers will look specifically for videos of their favorite topics.
- Pick one format that’s widely used and go with it. .avi, or .wmv are all fine. .mov, .mpg and .mp4 are also fine but not used as often.
- Use a title for the video (linked text) that is both catchy (to convince a person to watch it), and keyword descriptive (so spiders will associate the linked text with your video).
- Use keywords in the URL, if possible. For example, http://www.empiremedia.com/training_seminar_september_2012.wmv is fine.
- Use some of the social bookmarking and reading tools (Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Digg, etc.) that will help make the videos more visible and generate additional inbound links to the video page.
- Give others the opportunity to embed your video on their website with a link back to your website. Inbound link love!
- Be sure to list them on other video sharing sites like YouTube. The additional exposure can’t hurt, and will likely generate a stream of visitors to your site from links you embed on the video page.
- Create a script of the video that you can place directly under the video. This helps with adding rich content to a page that may not have much. mixergy.com does this well — their entire model is video interviews, but when they publish the interview for their site readers they also publish the fully transcript for the search engine spiders (and readers). It’s a great idea for video search engine optimization!
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