You don’t have to search long and far to discover the positive effects video has on business marketing. The sheer number of people watching videos to obtain information these days is astounding, and the trend continues upward. Businesses that post videos to their site will now reap one more benefit: an increase in search engine optimization ranking.

Video SEO
There are numerous ways to ensure that your site is capitalizing on the SEO benefits that videos offer:

  • Text: Each video you upload needs a title, description, and tags. The title should contain choice keywords or a phase that properly name the video. Familiarize yourself with what your customers are/would be searching for in regards to the content of the video; incorporate those keywords into the title and description where possible. Incorporating those search terms as tags will also help the video appear in searches with related content. Each video should contain these three things, at a minimum, in order to maximize your SEO ranking.
  • Captions: While not relevant to all videos, consider adding captions where you can. The additional text will be scanned by search engines, which will increase the likelihood that your video will appear in search results.
  • Video Sitemap: Creating a video sitemap and submitting through Google’s Webmaster Tools will make the search engine aware of your video, its title,description, tags, runtime, thumbnail image, etc. (assuming you’ve included that information in the sitemap). All these bits of information will help the engine index your video, which in turn will boost your search rankings.
  • URL: Incorporating the title of the video into the URL will not only help search engines, it will also give the video credibility to people looking at the URL in their search results. Viewers are likely to watch the video whose URL includes their search terms rather than one whose URL simply contains nonsensical words/letters/numbers. Search engines mimic users in this sense; help your rankings by carefully choosing your URL slug.
  • Social Media: After uploading the video and submitting your sitemap, take to your social media accounts (including blogs, user communities, etc.) to get the word out about the video(s). Social media allows people to easily share content; include the video link in your posts to encourage this behavior.

By following a few simple SEO guidelines, videos can positively impact your website rankings. Video optimization can be a great way for you to expose your brand to users who may otherwise not have been familiar with your brand, product, or services. It is a great way to engage, entertain, and promote that will get you great results on search engines.

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