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by: MarkRobertson
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Word Count: 623
All have heard about the online video phenomenon that is hitting the internet. Viewers by the millions are going online to upload and watch online video content each day. Often, videos are a more effective way to convey an advertiser's message than typical offline advertising. And because video is becoming so mainstream, the cost to create online video content is extremely low and affordable for almost anyone. Online video has seen massive improvements in the past 2 years with regard to broadband connectivity, streaming, etc... Keeping in mind the vast popularity of online video as a method of internet marketing, it is important to learn the techniques most effective for optimizing your video for search engines.
1) All SEO specialists know that the search engines are built to index and rank text. Being that it is more difficult for the search engines to understand the content within a video (though they are working on it), it is a good idea to include as much text surrounding the video itself if possible. One excellent way to do this is to include a text transcript of your video alongside your video with keyword rich title and descriptions.
2) Don't forget to encode the keywords you are targeting into your video. Try to use the word "video" as much as possible, make sure the word "video" is used in your title, description, meta data etc.
3) Just as with normal techniques for SEO, it is just as important that you develop links to your video for off-page search engine optimization. Try to get as many quality links to your video as possible. Perhaps submit to social bookmarking sites and friend's blogs.
4) It is advisable to create a separate sitemap just for your videos in your site and try to keep your video files in one directory this would help the web crawlers to locate your video files speedily and effortlessly.
5) If you are hosting the video on your own site, it is advisable to do your best to utilize a player that is not flash as search engines have difficulty understanding flash content. That being said, it will be difficult to empower video on your site without a simiple flash player. If you can not get around it, do your best to take advantage of the other SEO techniques since search engines cant understand the flash technology.
6) It is advisable to optimize the URLs of your video pages for the search engines with the help of mod_rewrite function so that the pages are freely assessable by the search engines.
7) Various video search engines use to capture thumbnails of your in different manner. Some of them take the first frame of your video, while others try to take from the middle or end. It is better to experiment with each site individually to make sure they are displaying the right thumbnail for your video. A video thumbnail is always crucial when it comes to decide for a viewer which video to watch.
8) Try to keep one video per page and put all video pages into the same directory or folder.
Beside the above mentioned points there are few more points relevant for the optimization:
9) With any SEO that you do online, choose keywords that you know users are searching for. Use keyword research tools to discover keywords and phrases that are most often searched for when looking for the information that you are creating.
10) Allow users to submit comments and feedback on your videos. Studies show that viewers who offer feedback are those most likely to convert and take the desired action that you are trying to solicit, whether it be an email, website visit, or purchase.
This post was written by Mark Robertson, a known expert in search marketing and in Video SEO. For more guidelines and techniques on video search engine optimization, please view our Video SEO Guide.