Did you know that viewership and user-generated videos have gone up nearly 48% from 2008, and you can bet it will go up even more next year!
Marketing with content is a great way to draw traffic to your site through organic search. All the major search engines have complex algorithms for crawling sites, analyzing the text-based content, indexing that content and using it to deliver relevant search results for users. But…
Video Content Left Out of Search Engine Results
This text-based approach used by Google, Yahoo, Bing etc. has left much of what we value as content out of the content game… the biggest and best example being video. If you are a business that creates video content you have probably found this to be a major frustration.
Current search engine algorithms have no way to know what the content of a video file contains. The process of deciphering the content of a video with a search engine spider and indexing algorithm would require a level of artificial intelligence not yet developed by humans.
Work Arounds for Getting Video Content into Search Results
Here are four workaround strategies you can use to get your video content to start showing up in search engine results:
Did you know that YouTube is now secretly transcribing the audio in your videos and using this data to help with relevancy in search results? You may have considered creating transcripts of your video content to get your videos to show in search engine results pages but the cost is high for the potential return. If you host your videos on YouTube not only do you save a ton of bandwidth… you may get your transcriptions free as part of the package.
Not really a search-oriented tip but a cool little improvement for your viewers. If you can add “&fmt;=18” to the end of your video link and it will display in HD when that link is clicked?
You can boost your video content’s likelihood of showing up in keyword searches by simply renaming your video file before uploading it. Most videos have file names like this “047y6708dsx.mov” Change it to a keyword or three that are relevant to your market. I have discussed this technique of writing keyword oriented file names for better search results before but it applies to video content even more. Without a transcript, the only way a search engine can determine the content of a video file is by the file name or the tags. Make sure you use these to your best advantage.
These quick tips should help you get more organic search traffic for your video content. Make sure you use these simple production level tips to boost your results.