Video SEO Smoke and Mirrors or Real Results?
Mark Robertson, ReelSEO
Intro
- Shift to search: people search more for the word video more than “god”. Trend
- May 2007 Google Launched video results
- Now, 40% of search results page on Google contain video
- Eyetracking shows that video thumbnails get a lot more attention than regular links
Video SEO overview and strategy
- How does video affect overall SEO. Positive: generate buzz, inbound links, website traffic. Negative: needs to be thought about. Not everybody is a SEO expert
- Video SEO is about best practices. Not a magic bullet
- 2 main strategies: Hosted scenario (on site), posted outside (YouTube, etc)
Hosted scenario (web site video SEO)
- Measure, control the experience, tags, etc.
Posted videos (YouTube, etc)
- Large audience
- Show up multiple times in SERP
- Duplicate content not penalized right now: you can syndicate the same video to mulltiple video sites
Tips for hosted videos:
- Each videos has a central landing page
- Put all the videos in a central location (video.mysite.com)
- Create navigation links to your videos
- Use embedded players better than popups
- Don’t use session IDs in URLs, use relevant keyword in URLs
- Page titles very important, H1 titles too
- Have related text around the video
- Comments
Enabling interaction and sharing
- Let people share on Twitter (comment about Twitter having implemented rel=”nofollow” recently, thereby reducing the value of posting links to Twitter)
- Allow users to subscribe using mRSS
How to get into search engines?
Syndication to YouTube/etc: use services like TubeMogul to upload to multiple sites at once
- titles are extremely important
- try variations in titles – duplicate content
- Descriptive about the video
- Leverage tags
- Put the URL in the start of the description
Future of video search – production quality
Because most engines are working on speech recognition techniques, image and face recognition, make sure to produce in high quality
- Measuring SEO – be patient. Results will take time.
- Use long talk keyword searches
- Resist the urge to copy the description from the manufacturer
- “View” or “Watch”
eBags case study
