Introduction to Video SEO
In this Introduction to Video SEO Chris covers some basics you can apply to your website today to better leverage Animoto videos. It get’s a little technical but if you’re wondering how you can take advantage of video to boost your search rankings this quick guide is worth a read.
Introducing Video SEO
Today, with the internet attracting a diverse audience ranging from the tech-savvy professional to the stay-at-home mom an increasing number of online marketers are turning towards video as the means to deliver their message.
There is just one fundamental problem — if we are relying more and more on video to showcase our connect and to sell our product then it needs to be discoverable. Unfortunately search engines tend to handle video content poorly – they cannot ‘watch’ it and extract keywords in the same way they scan a web page, so as internet marketers we must learn a new set of SEO techniques specifically geared towards video and rich media.
Lets review some techniques to help video work for you whilst still enabling good SEO.
Getting Your House in Order
The foundation of traditional SEO is your markup – your content needs to exist in your HTML pages as text which can be read by a search engine, crafted by a copy-writer for optimal keyword density. On top of that, semantic markup should describe the importance and structure of your content. A H2 tag at the top of the page obviously carries much more weight than a P tag towards the bottom of your page. Similarly, the UL, DL and OL tags should be used to group similar items together.
With video, similar principles apply, and there are several techniques you can use to make your content visible to search engines and other websites which may be interested in your content.
Facebook Metadata
Facebook has led the way with their sharing mechanism. Whenever you post a page on your Facebook feed, or you click one of those “Share on Facebook” buttons, their spider visits your page looking for content to share.
If you have video content on your page then you can add tags to your page which allows the content to be discovered. These are standard META tags which exist within the HEAD element of your page. For a complete reference of these tags, go here: Facebook’s developer wiki.
In addition to Facebook, this convention has been adopted by other social networks and content aggregators such as MySpace, along with search engines like Google.
For an example of this in action, if you look at an Animoto video play page, you can see the following tags in the source code:
<meta name="title" content="New Puppy" />
<meta name="description" content="Meet Juno, our new Pomeranian puppy." />
<meta name="medium" content="video" />
<link rel="image_src" href="https://s3-p.animoto.com/Video/q6W7MjkrqYuiI1mZwAtaSg/cover_432x240.jpg" />
<link rel="video_src" href="https://static.animoto.com/swf/w.swf?w=swf/vp1&e=1271786536&f=q6W7MjkrqYuiI1mZwAtaSg&d=130&m=p&r=w+s&i=m&ct=&cu=&options=" />
<meta name="video_height" content="240" />
<meta name="video_width" content="432" />
<meta name="video_type" content="application/x-shockwave-flash" />
These provide the name and description of the video, as well as technical details about the video itself. This allows Facebook and others to visit the page, discover the video content and re-embed the content. If I post my video to Facebook, you can see that the data is pre-populated, and I can play the video from within the page.
RDFa
An alternative means of making content discoverable is using something called RDFa, a metadata format specified by the W3C and used most prominently by Yahoo! SearchMonkey. It involves placing similar metadata in your document to Facebook, however it is often more involved to integrate into your site. Lack of support also makes it much less relevant.
Spreading the Word
As most SEO’s will tell you ensuring your content looks good is only half the battle. You also have to tell search engines that it is there. With websites, a good starting point is to create an XML sitemap and make it available to search engines. The same can be done with your videos.
Google allows you to tell it about your videos by submitting a sitemap. The benefit here is that if used correctly it can give you additional prominence in search results.
If you look at the search to the right for the keyword pomeranian, you can see Google has mixed in photos and video into my results. In fact, only three text results are shown above the fold. Looking at the videos themselves, you can see they have had hundreds of thousands of views, coming mostly from users discovering through search.
So, having relevant video is a perfect way to jump to the top of search results and overtake your competitors. Not only are you often higher up on the page, image results have been demonstrated to have a much higher click through rate compared to text results.
If we look at an example video sitemap, we can see that it contains similar information to what was contained in our Facebook share tags, however in this case we place the XML file on our web server and submit it to Google through their webmaster tools.
<urlset xmlns="https://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
xmlns:video="https://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-video/1.1">
<url>
<loc>https://animoto.com/</loc>
<video:video>
<video:content_loc>https://static.animoto.com/videos/learn_more.flv</video:content_loc>
<video:player_loc allow_embed="yes" autoplay="autostart=true"><![CDATA[ https://static.animoto.com/swf/w.swf?w=swf/vp1&e=1270228287&f=https://static.animoto.com/videos/learn_more.flv&i=https://static.animoto.com/videos/cover_learnmore.jpg&m=p&ct=Visit%20Animoto&cu=https://animoto.com&options=startstretched ]]></video:player_loc>
<video:thumbnail_loc>https://static.animoto.com/videos/cover_learnmore.jpg</video:thumbnail_loc>
<video:title>Animoto in 60 Seconds</video:title>
<video:description>Animoto is a service which combines your images and movie clips into a video which looks something like a movie trailer. You can retrieve images from Flickr, Facebook and more. We analyze every nuance of your images and sync them to a soundtrack to produce something you can send to your friends, advertise your product and more. No two videos are ever the same.</video:description>
<video:rating>5.0</video:rating>
<video:view_count>12345</video:view_count>
<video:tag>animoto</video:tag>
<video:tag>video</video:tag>
<video:tag>slideshow</video:tag>
<video:tag>greeting</video:tag>
<video:category>Internet</video:category>
<video:family_friendly>yes</video:family_friendly>
<video:expiration_date>2009-11-05T19:20:30+08:00</video:expiration_date>
<video:duration>69</video:duration>
</video:video>
</url>
</urlset>
For information on creating your own video sitemaps, refer to: Google’s sitemap documentation.
Currently Google is the only major search engine which supports video sitemaps, however expect others to start supporting them in the future.
The other way to easily get your videos in Google search results is to upload them to YouTube, ensuring they contain appropriate descriptions and tags. Whilst this is a simpler process compared to creating and publishing a site map, it may be harder to direct traffic back to your website once they have viewed your videos on YouTube, so that is worth considering.
Conclusions
All in all, video is quickly becoming the future of the web, and by making it discoverable you can make it work for your business by generating search traffic and capturing visitors attention. As search engines are constantly improving themselves and evolving, expect opportunities for online video to open up over the next few years.