So, you want to get your video onto the first page of a Google search but  how do you actually do it?

Video SEO is an emerging art form and many more people are realising the benefit of video to promote products and services.

Video marketing however, is a whole different kettle of fish and that’s something we’re not going to consider with this entry.

Video SEO requires you to put a lot more emphasis on the text that you have surrounding your video rather than the video itself. Because a video file contains so much data, the search engine spiders that crawl through the web can’t analyse the video itself, so if you’re going to get your video ranking on Google, you’re going to have to think a little bit outside the box.

As video quality doesn’t matter to the spiders it’s important to make sure that your text surrounding the video is of a high quality, this ranges from the title you choose, to the description you give your video, to the tags or meta elements you assign to the video when it is published.

As with anything search ranking related, we don’t really know how Google ranks videos in its engine, this is something we can only speculate about and we consider factors of both on page and off page traditional SEO when we look at how to rank a video.

Starting with on page techniques, as we mentioned previously, the title and description sections of the video must be of a high relevancy, and you need to make sure that they are keyword rich, and this can be matched up with any tags you have assigned to the video in question. These elements all add up to note the relevance of the video and in turn the video will  have an increased likelihood of being ranked within Gooogle’s blended results.

The rating the video has been given added to the number of views the video has received also appear to play a big part in how a video is ranked.

Search engines primarily work to give the user what they are looking for. So if you have 2 video’s and one is 10 minutes long, has a rating of 3 out of 5 and 500,000 views  and another, with a rating of 5, but it’s half an hour long and only 5 views. Google is more likely to rank the first video, purely because it seems to be more of what the user is looking for.

Another tactic that is becoming more and more predominant in the world of video SEO is the addition of transcriptions to videos published online.

We already know that the content of the video itself isn’t able to be processed by the serch engine spiders, but, a transcription of the video content IS able to be processed and that in itself, provided the transcription is relevant to the rest of the indexed content.

So when you’re starting out with SEO on your videos make sure you make the most of the on page options you’re given. Ensure that keywords are optimised for your content and that you consider the 4 factors of: Title, Description, Rating and Views.  By using all these factors and optimising for them as much as you can, you will have the best chance of having your video rated on the top search engines.

Video URL: SEO Title Tags

Just a short and fairly basic video from a UK SEO on the subject of on-page title tags. I thought this may be of some use to some of the more inexperienced webmasters looking to learn the basics…