SEO

How Videos Help Your SEO

arrowSearch Engine Optimisation (SEO) changed when Google brought in the Panda and Penguin updates. It places more of an emphasis on diversifying SEO techniques. You have to do more than simply write a block of text. Videos do much to enhance SEO. It's a new way of communicating with your customers and, in the eyes of Google, makes your site more valuable.

High Quality

Videos are all about quality, whereas SEO is about traffic. Good video quality is more likely to bring in viewers because they want to watch something worthwhile. The added traffic says to Google your content is more valuable, and so you begin to climb up the search engines.

Quality applies on two fronts. Firstly, make sure you have a high resolution. Nobody wants to watch something which is pixelated. And it also needs to entertain and inform. Someone should walk away from one of your videos believing it was worth their time.

Provide a Message

Google said how they want to rank websites based on the value they give to a visitor. Videos go a long way to helping with this. The emphasis on multimedia allows people to learn in different ways. Some prefer videos and some prefer images. All you have to do is make sure your video offers a message and a final closing point.

Drive this home by making it clear in your video's title and repeating it in any video description.

Capture Your Audience

Capturing an audience increases the chances of them sharing it with their friends and family. Another big change in SEO is a new focus on social media. More ‘shares' on social media enhances SEO. Creating a video which people think is utterly fantastic is more likely to translate into more ‘shares' and ‘likes'.

Actually encouraging your audience to do this is an entirely different story, especially with the thousands of other productions you have to compete with.

Let your content speak for itself. Stay away from the special effects tray as this is more likely to put people off. Make it smooth, seamless, and professional.

Beware of Music

Elevator music in a corporate video is seen as the ‘standard' treatment. In truth, it adds very little. Apart from being utterly annoying and sterile, it's also a way to take attention away from the message. If nobody can see what you're trying to say, why would they share it with their friends?

Use music sparingly, and preferably in the credits or very briefly in the introduction. Remove it during the points where you're trying to communicate something and more people will watch it.

Advertisements

To Google, advertisements aren't useful and add no value to a website. Include too many and they'll accuse you of spamming. Advertisements in videos are always a bad idea. Nobody likes having an advertisement in their video. Just look at the advertisements Google placed on YouTube as an example.

When you think about it, why should you risk turning people off from a video because of an advertisement? The quality of your video is a subtle advertisement in itself. Impress someone and they're more likely to come back and buy something.

Linking the Page

A good way of raising SEO value is to encourage viewers to link the page not the video. Rather than embedding the link into Facebook or an email, they can send the link of the original page. When people click the link, they'll automatically visit your site. It increases SEO value, due to the increased traffic, and boosts you up the search engines.

Video Size

Video size also contributes to the way your productions influence SEO. A bigger start file leads to a lower SEO file than a shorter compressed start file. Let it load quickly and implement different quality options.

Not everyone has a high-speed Internet connection. Let them select a different quality option and they'll watch the video, which enhances web traffic. And the added convenience is another plus in Google's view.

Brand Awareness

A passive benefit of videos is they also target the shoppers of your competitors. Since you'll appear near each other in the search rankings, they might watch one of your videos and decide to switch to you instead.

You can't really control this, but it's always there. It's also something which is difficult to track.

Value of a Video

The true value of a video isn't in its direct SEO content. Videos have a negligible influence on your ranking. What they add is value to a website. They advertise you to customers directly. Where the SEO value comes is within the amount of times visitors share videos. If it turns viral you can expect your site to suddenly find itself flying up the rankings.

Published on behalf of Mr. John Kravz. John is a professional outsource writer. Click here to find out more.

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