Though publishing videos on the web has been child’s play for years now, the process of getting them to rank high in search remains enigmatic at best, frustrating at worst. The pace of video publication is accelerating faster than ever, and though video SEO seems to have been left behind the rest of the industry, it’s finally starting to catch up through some exciting developments that will hopefully provide more incentives for publishers to produce great video content.
As we start a new year and a new decade, here’s a look at the state of web video SEO right now.
The State of Web Video
When you produce a video now, there’s no dearth of places to publish it. Though YouTube remains the dominant player in the industry, Vimeo , Blip.tv, Viddler, Metacafe, and a host of other sites (most of them free) have fragmented the market. There’s no need to build or host your own video player, and you can leave the heavy bandwidth duties to them rather than your own server.
Just as there’s lots of competition in the platform arena, competition among videos themselves is growing wildly. YouTube spokesman Aaron Zamost said over 20 hours of video are uploaded to the site every minute, and about 120 decades of video are uploaded each year.
Hundreds of little tweaks and tricks exist in optimizing a webpage for search, yet the entire realm of video SEO right now consists of only a few to-dos and a lot of finger-crossing. Zamost summed up the basics for ranking high in a YouTube search:
“Have a clear, descriptive title, and include as many accurate tags as you can. For example, if you’ve created a video that shows how to tie a bow tie, your title should be ‘How to tie a bow tie.’ That’s really important, because that’s [what] your target viewer probably wanted to learn. So think visually — ties, dress, how to dress nice, how to tie a tie, how to tie a bow tie, etc.
It’s also important to note that many users who are searching for video just want to be entertained, and may not be looking for something that precise. So if you’ve created compelling content, think about how a user would likely find it. Tags like ‘funny video,’ while generic, can be very useful.”
Many publishers, however, are concerned with getting links and traffic to their site, not just their YouTube page. Rand Fishkin, CEO and co-founder of the multi-million dollar SEO agency SEOmoz, emphasizes the importance of placing videos on your own site and submitting a video sitemap to search engines.
“Video results are often far easier to ‘rank,’ than standard web results, but there are some hoops you’ll need to jump through,” Fishkin said in an e-mail.
However, users sharing videos by embedding or linking to them in their own sites often leads to traffic and link juice being sent to the third party site (like YouTube or Metacafe) that actually hosts the video, rather than a publisher’s own. A vital part of SEO strategy is getting other websites to link to your site. If people are linking to your content on YouTube, your site doesn’t build much (if any) link equity or page rank at all, which can be discouraging for web publishers.
New Developments
Because search engine robots only understand actual text, they can’t determine the quality of a video by the content inside it — only by the links to it and the content around it, like the title or tags. People have muddled over this problem for a long time, and a couple of realistic solutions have recently emerged.
First, YouTube now has the ability to place captions on its videos. The transcript of a video can be attached to its timeline, allowing users seek to specific portions of YouTube videos by phrase. This transcript can be searched and indexed by the engines, meaning your video content itself can count toward ranking now. Whereas originally you had to provide your own captions to attach, YouTube can now do captions automatically. As with any robotic transcription however, human intervention may be required to fix computer-generated mistakes in the text.
Placing a video’s transcript in its description has been a somewhat common SEO practice in the past, but the marriage of the transcript to the video timeline itself is a definite advancement.
Another company to recently stumble on a similar solution for web video SEO is the New York-based SpeakerText. SpeakerText helps you perform the same transcript-to-video matrimony as YouTube captions, but further puts SEO power in publishers’ hands through a concept it calls “QuoteLinks.”
Basically, once your video has been “speakertexted,” you can embed it on your own website with the transcript attached. Visitors can select a chunk of the transcript, copy it, and paste it in their own blog or website as a link to the exact moment in the video where the quote appears. The link goes to the publisher’s site, not YouTube’s. Right now SpeakerText only works with YouTube, but the company says it plans to provide the service for other platforms in the future.
“Anytime somebody quotes, it will link back to the original source, which is good for the end user because they can actually see it in context,” said CEO Matt Mireles, “… and the publisher gets rewarded because it not only sends viral traffic directly, but then the link creates huge SEO.”
SpeakerText is free if you provide your own transcript, and you can order transcription through the site at what it claims is roughly half the cost of traditional transcription services. SpeakerText utilizes an army of “Turkees” at Mechanical Turk to do the transcribing.
The Future
So what’s next for video SEO?
Fishkin believes that new platforms like the iPad and the Android Marketplace have big implications for the future. “I suspect this divergence of video from the open web to closed platforms (a curious shift indeed) may have some substantive impact in the future,” he said.
Zamost said that “social elements are playing an increasingly important role in the development of new features on YouTube, especially related to search and discovery.” The incorporation of social trends in search algorithms could spell big changes indeed for the SEO industry.
Whatever happens next, it’s clear that video SEO is finally starting to catch up to the rest of the web. With services like SpeakerText and YouTube captions emerging to help eliminate unsearchable content issues, the future likely holds more automated and accurate video-text mapping and perhaps eventually video editing in the cloud.
What changes are you hoping for? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
Don’t be afraid to integrate Facebook and Twitter on a business blog. It’s a standard practice and will help drive new visitors to your blog. Social media buttons make it easy for customers to tweet out your work, while adding links to the company’s Twitter and YouTube accounts will help bolster their numbers and improve their ranking in search.
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