It’s no secret that Google loves video on web pages. Which as you already know, means there is great potential in publishing them in the right way for optimal SEO results. It’s about providing relevant and useful information for Google to crawl, or index, from the video embedcode. We’ve put together these six steps to help you optimize and improve your SEO results through the power of video:

1. Write Lengthy Video Descriptions

Why? A good description is highly relevant for SEO purposes and should give a clear understanding of the content of the video. Good descriptions should be at least 150 characters long, but can easily go up to 1,000 words.
How? Define a handful of keywords, use those same keywords consistently in the description, and start with the most important information. Keep the description detailed and precise, so the viewer knows exactly what content they about to engage with.

2. Always Tag Your Videos

Why? A consistent usage of tags is highly relevant for SEO and navigation on your video section, used to help identify videos that are interesting or relevant to your viewers.
How? Identify five one-word video keywords that represent the essence of the video content and try to reuse the same tags in a generic way. You can even consider adding a video “trigger” keyword to notify search engines that your content is there and worth crawling. The keywords used could be anything from “about”, “review” or “top”.

3. Video Sitemaps FTW

Why? A video sitemap is a document that contains all the information, or metadata, needed for Google to be able to index your page. A well-written sitemap will give you a huge competitive advantage as research shows Google prefers videos to other search results.
How? The problem is that sitemaps can become quite complex to create, host and update. Video marketing tools can help alleviate this issue by providing the much-needed infrastructure for sitemaps.

Watch the expert on SEO and Moz founder Rand Fiskin.

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4. Optimize All Video Titles

Why? Because the title is the first thing your viewers see and could be the deciding factor whether they choose to click play or not. Therefore it’s crucial that the title catches the essence of the video.
How? Chose a highly-searchable phrase that gives a clear understanding of the content of the video, also when the video is watched outside of its original context. Google truncates titles over 60 characters so make sure to be descriptive and use only the most relevant words.

5. Don’t Forget About Embeds and sharing

Lastly, remember to utilize the online community you already have. Sharing or embedding of a video player in other communities, such as LinkedIn, is highly encouraged. When your audience decides to share your video this is realized to be positive user experience behaviors and rewarded by Google.

6. Add a Transcript

It doesn’t work in every situation, but a lot of brands utilize transcription of videos to add another layer of SEO power. This allows Google to crawl more written content and increase the likelihood that your video will rank for the relevant keywords you’ve chosen. It also allows for a diversity of content so that users can choose whether they want to read or watch the information you’ve shared.

Get in touch to learn more about video marketing automation with TwentyThree >>

Written by: Todd Patton, Head of comms and story