5 Defining Factors and Tactics of Video SEO
Video and SEO might seem a little bit incompatible at first, but nowadays, when first-page search engine results are media-rich, knowing some basic rules of the SEO road can help drive traffic.
Why video, when it’s the one thing search engines can’t crawl completely?
Because there is little to no competition. You might have noticed how when you search for a certain keyword, video results pop out, and most of them are mediocre, standard videos with little to no meaning. That’s the one sure sign that few people are bothering with SEO for videos, but that has the potential of changing because of the sole structure of videos and it’s benefits.
The entire concept of watching videos has been changed. Whereas some 10 years ago, watching video on a computer was limited to downloading files at lower speeds, playing them locally and distributing them very hard if you wanted to, this has changed to watching videos online on any of the modern smartphones. It’s something that we’re so used to, that modern technology makers are striving to make it as portable as they can. You can easily see why optimizing for video, as an unexplored but very powerful aspect of media, can be crucial.
But how would you optimize for videos, what are the main metrics, the main targets in the optimization of videos ? Well there are actually several things. Most of them haven’t been researched in depth, but if you think about them, it makes a lot of sense:
1. Title - as you could have probably figured out yourself, the title of a video plays an essential role. After all, imagine the following situation: you go to YouTube and search for shoes. If someone would like you to see their video about shoes, they’d title it appropriately. The title is the one quickest way to direct both people and search engines to what might be hidden inside the video.
2. Description – not as obvious but longer than the title of the video, the description allows to add more information which might help the indexing and categorization of a certain video.
3. Views – it’s more speculative if views actually affect the algorithm, but it is very likely that can also be a part of the algorithm. What’s the main goal of search engines? To provide information which is more useful up front to the users, and what better way to detect more human activity than views?
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