Ever launch a video to the sound of crickets chirping? Video SEO is an emerging set of best practices to help videos get found, understood, and popularized across the internet. Here are 9 quick tips to improve your Video SEO:
1. Use an high quality embedded player like wimpywasp.com’s player. Avoid embedding youtube’s player in your site, as it directs traffic away from your site – and provides a less professional impression to your visitors.
2. Each video should have it’s own page. This page should have it’s title tag, h1 heading, and meta description focused on the targeted keywords. Text and text links that can be crawled should also be on the page.
3. Provide the video in several of the major formats, including FLV, MOV, MPG, MP4, AVI, WMV.
4. Use the keyword opportunities when naming the video files themselves, as well as in any keyword, title, and author fields.
5. Provide a text transcript of the video, and either link to the transcript of the video from your targeted page – or include the text at the bottom of the targeted page itself. This provides additional content that – hopefully – includes your targeted keywords.
6. Distribute the video everywhere: youtube, blinkx, metacafe, Aol Video etc.
7. Offer a video rss feed and a video sitemap to sites like Yahoo video. Be sure to link to the RSS feed properly from each video page.
8. Provide links to Social Bookmarking sites, for easy bookmarking and sharing.
9. If appropriate, offer the option to embed your video in other sites. This really encourages people to spread the video around.