How to make your video rocket to the first page on Google
Online videos have become immensely popular over the past few years and many businesses and websites have used them in a variety of ways to give themselves a boost. It is even estimated in a report by Cisco that by 2016, about 55 percent of all consumer internet traffic would be generated through video views. This is why a large number of marketers have turned to videos to market their business and take a chunk of that traffic.
However, that is no easy task. Internet is a huge place and it is becoming more so by the day. Thousands of videos are posted and disappear, without much success. The success could be fast…your video could go viral in the matter of minutes but it can just easily be lost in the darker corner of the internet as well. Moreover, not only do you want people to see your video. You want it to be seen by the right audience! So, how to achieve that task? Well in one word: SEO
However, the question is how to optimize videos for search engine? Following are some of the tips to answer that question:
Use Keywords
The first thing to do for video SEO is always using the right keywords. Just like written content, the purpose of adding keywords is to tell bots the main subject of your content. Keywords are important but even more important is the fact that the keywords you write should look natural. However, if it is possible, you should always include keywords in the title, description and tags of the video.
To optimize videos for search engines you would, of course, have to do a little research for right keywords. You would find Google AdWords Keyword Planner very useful for that and it can be found here.
While we are discussing Google, it must be noted that you do have a better chance of ranking well on YouTube as compared to Google. So if it is convenient for you, you could use YouTube instead of some other hosting or even your own website…You can still embed the video on your website and that would actually help the video ranking on YouTube.
The final trick to remember here is, there are some keywords which generally result in Google showing video link on the first page of search. And since you are posting video, you could try finding those keywords which results in that.
Add Tags
Tagging, like keywords, help the bots categorize videos which makes it easier for the audience to find them. You don’t need to have tags just for the main topic of the content only, you can also use tags for anything mentioned or shown in the video.
Create an Impressive Title
Although attractive titles lost their importance when keywords became important because on internet, search engines only show your website at high rankings when they have the right keywords—very few people chose on the basis of “attractive title” when they somehow found it. However, with the rise of social media, the attractiveness of the title is back in the game too!
It must be remembered that you should introduce the keyword in title as early as possible. Similarly words like “how to,” and “review” in the title can also be helpful.
Have a Good Description
Since bots cannot actually watch your videos, so they look into the description to determine what the video is about, which is why a keywords inclusive, thorough description is extremely important. It’s important to remember that the YouTube bots cannot actually watch your video, so the content you have on the page is how YouTube determines the contents of your video. Your description is the spot where you can add the most text, so you need to make it count. This is where you should be utilizing your keywords—this will help you rank for those keywords as well as long-tail keywords.
Putting your transcript in the description is an excellent way to include relevant, keyword-rich content that will help both your viewers and your optimization efforts, particularly if you are discussing a confusing or involved topic.
Creating a sitemap lets the bots know that you have a video on your site, so it can be indexed on the search engine. As opposed to ranking your YouTube content high on search engine, sitemaps help inform bots that your video is being hosted on your website. Due to which, the link to the video on your site ranks higher, directing interested viewers to your web page.
These are some of the main tricks for video SEO. There are several other things you could do but most important of them all is: share your video as much as possible!