One of the most challenging areas for online video publishers is to optimize their video to be more discoverable by search engines, and for businesses, this is critical to bring new traffic and customers to their web sites
. Publishing video content in a way that it can be easily indexed by search engines has been proven to
increase higher first-page Google
rankings. It's not smoke and mirrors, and it's done through video search engine optimization (VSEO) which, as my good friend and publisher of
ReelSEO, Mark Robertson says is, "
video SEO purely an extension of SEO."
Search engine optimization (SEO) is defined as:
"The process of making a site and its content highly relevant for both search engines and searchers. SEO includes technical tasks to make it easier for search engines to find and index a site for the appropriate keywords, as well as marketing-focused tasks to make a site more appealing to users. Successful search marketing helps a site gain top positioning for relevant words and phrases." - Search Engine Watch SEM Glossary
While traditional SEO techniques are focused on text-based search, the rules are different for video search since it can't be discovered on its own by search engines. Nico McLane attempted to uncover the mystery behind VSEO in her
Streaming Media article,
In Search of Video SEO That Works, and concluded that the secret's in the sauce and no two recipes are the same. Mark Robertson says that despite the hype, there is still a general lack of understanding when it
summed it up this way:“Video SEO is not a means in and of itself, it is a strategy and a set of best practices that need to be combined with best practices for producing, publishing, and syndicating online video content. It is the application of SEO best practices when publishing online video content to ensure maximum visibility across search engines and ultimately, your target audience. Ultimately, the ROI depends on many factors but is similar to that which can be achieved with traditional, oragnic SEO.”
In a report by Forrester Research's Nate Elliott,
he pointed out that search engines have been blending specialty search results (e.g., video, news, images, blog posts) into their standard search result pages for several years, and concluded that optimizing video content to take advantage of "blended search" is by far the
easiest way to get a first-page organic ranking on Google. In fact it's 53 times more likely to generate a first page Google ranking than traditional SEO techniques.
In this panel session from the
Online Video Platform Summit on optimizing video search and discovery, Mark joins Dr. Pete Kocks of
Truveo, Lou Schwartz of
Multicast Media, and Tom Wilde from
RAMP, in a discussion moderated by Tim Siglin of
Braintrust Digital. See this related post for detailed bios on each pressenter -
Online Video Platform Summit SEO Panel - Optimizing Video Search and Discoverability.
