Friday, 10 January 2014

Leveraging Online Videos to Empower Your Search Engine Optimisation Process



Search engine optimisers across the world continue to try different combinations of SEO strategies to benefit the rankings of their websites. Some techniques work in their favour, while others don’t. However, continuous exploration and development of these strategies is crucial for search engine optimisation success. Video marketing has been for years a crucial part of SEO strategy, yet very few people actually use it, primarily because of lack of understanding on how to go about it.


In this article, we will discuss on the impact of video marketing on your SEO strategy and how to kick-start it, along with some useful tips.

What is video marketing?

Hosting a promotional video on your website and other video hosting sites like YouTube and MetaCafe is a great way to market your brand. By hosting it on your existing site, you enhance the engagement factor of your existing site visitors, and when you host on social media sites like YouTube, you give more exposure to your brand by presenting to new people. This creates brand awareness. However, just putting up an interesting marketing video isn’t enough. It has to have certain aspects that would enhance its visibility on search engines.

How it benefits SEO?

When done correctly, online videos offer some amazing search engine optimisation benefits. Some of these benefits are presented below-

1.Popular videos would get more hits that would positively affect your SERP ranking.

2.Brings you inbound links.

3.Increases traffic.

4.Enhances user engagement with your brand.

5.All these benefits mean more business and greater revenue.

How to integrate video marketing in SEO?

The goal of hosting marketing videos on your website and social sharing websites is to enhance its popularity and increase the search referrals for your website. Creating videos just for the heck of it doesn’t help you in anyway, neither would you get the hits and go viral, nor would it fetch you a steady stream of traffic.

Having quality, engaging content is crucial for the success of your video. So before you begin with your video, prepare the content that is useful, engaging and worth sharing. Once you are ready with your content and have worked on the video, it is time to integrate search engine optimisation factors into it. Using keywords in the video cannot be extracted by the search engines, but you can use these keywords in the title of the video and its description. Adding keyword-rich titles and descriptions for your videos make the video accessible to the target audience.


Another crucial SEO factor in video marketing is the optimisation of the URL. It is necessary to include the title of your video in the URL, if you want the search engines to easily locate your file. Last but not the least, you have to increase the views and hits your video receives, so it is important that you encourage viewers to share the video if they like it, and make it go viral.

Useful tips

Take a look at these tips and get started with your own video marketing campaign-

1.Lengthy videos get boring, so keep it short and concise. Anything between 2-10 minutes would be good enough.

2.Use video sitemaps.

3.Create good thumbnails.

4.Hosting the videos on your blogs and websites gets you better search ranking than hosting them on video sharing sites

5.Place the link to these videos prominently on your website.

6.Set up your own video directory on a sub-domain.

7.Creating a transcript for the video is a great idea as Google crawls that text.

8.If you are uploading the video on video sharing sites, don’t just stick to YouTube.

By putting up online videos, you give your users a better way to learn about you, without having to read lengthy content.