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Last Updated on May 3, 2023 by Work In My Pajamas
For those of us who do business online, especially affiliate marketing, understanding the power of video when it comes to Google search placement has never been more important. In fact, even though Google introduced its universal search function in 2007, which embeds videos and images directly into the first search page, people are just now including video as part of their comprehensive SEO strategy. Video has a much higher chance of landing on the first page of searches than written content, simply because there is less of it. So, if you want to use video to generate some traffic, here are five simple things to keep in mind.
In This Post:
1. Choose the Right Title
It is hugely important to choose a title that gives users an exact description of the content within the video. Don’t use a title like, ‘The Birds Sing,’ for a video about a nature preserve. Instead, use something like ‘The Birds Sing: A Wild Creek Nature Preserve Documentary (9/9/11)’. This includes the key words that will be a part of the user search and effectively gives users a description of the content.
2. Tag It Appropriately
When you post a video on your own site or another site that hosts videos, you will also add search hash tags to the video description (i.e. #birds). When you do this, try to think of as many possible words people may use to search for a video like yours, and list them all. However, make sure not to use words that are a far stretch from what your content is actually about, or it could do more harm than good. Google’s ultimate goal is to make search as accurate as possible for users.
3. Create a Video Site Map
A video site map is what Google will use to search for and locate videos within your website. A video site map is a URL that includes a description of the video content on that page. This is the only way the Googlebot can discover video content at that URL. The entries must contain the title of the video, a description, the play page URL, the thumbnail URL, and the location of the raw video file.
4. Use Other Host Sites Wisely
Using video hosting sites, like YouTube or Vimeo, is a great way to hold off on dealing with video size on your own site. However, when it comes to SEO, your main goal is to get people onto your site, not YouTube of Vimeo. So, if you have videos that users may want to follow in order to get to the main content on your website, video hosts can be a great way to lead people there. If not, they could actually take away traffic from what would have otherwise been directed to your site.
5. Don’t Waste Your Time
If you’re going to put the time, effort and money into creating original video content for your site, make sure it’s something people will actually want to watch. Don’t make videos about things that would be better put in print, like lists. The goal is to get people to want to watch the video, so make it entertaining or informative.
Great tips Nadia! I wish I myself had more time to make/produce more videos!