Online Video Gaining Popularity
Image via CrunchBase
According to Website Magazine (which, incidentally, offers a great free quarterly print version), online video is set to really take off in the coming months. Fifty percent of adults regularly watch video online, with video-sharing sites and social media being major referrers. Video advertising is coming into its own, as well. Can you use these trends to your benefit with the usual search engines, too?
Video in Search Engine Results
In Google’s case, the answer is definitely yes. It’s not limited to text-only listings anymore, but often includes videos related to the search terms at the top of results pages, which can give you an edge:
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With the recent changes, Google seems to be placing more importance on these new ways to search. Videos have taken a big step forward and can now pop up on the first page and stay there. Producing a video is now one of the fastest ways to get on the first page of Google, even for very competitive keywords. While many online marketers are taking advantage of this fact, it is relatively new and you can have a much better chance of ranking for a video instead of an ordinary web page in Google. It can happen almost instantly.
Ref: How to Rank Higher in Google’s New Search Engines (SiteProNews)
Tips for Effective Video Promotion
That’s great news, but where do you go from here? What are some tactics you can use to promote yourself with videos? Here are a few ideas to get you started:
- Insert keywords into your video filenames.
Image via CrunchBase
Host your videos on YouTube, and embed those YouTube videos into your own site. Google says its algorithms consider how many times a video is viewed, and any views embedded videos receive on your own site get added to the ‘views’ tally on YouTube. (And yes, nearly every video we saw Google blend into its results came from YouTube.)
- Optimize your YouTube videos by writing keywords into your videos’ titles, descriptions, and tags.
- Embed videos into relevant text pages on your site. The context provided by the text on those pages (which is hopefully already optimized for search as well) will help the search engines figure out what your videos are about.
- Also create a video library on your site, so Google knows where to find your video content. (Google Video Sitemaps can help with this too.) Write keyword-rich annotations for each video in the library.
There you have it. May your video views and customers be many!
Related articles
- Practical Social Media (Part 2) (searchenginepeople.com)
- 5 Ways to Get More From Online Video (ducttapemarketing.com)
