Optimize Video for Your Website

Darren Franks - June 29, 2010

Embedding videos on your website is a great way to engage people and give them the information they need. We all know that, from a user experience point of view, videos can be both informative and fun. That being said, how do we make sure they get the maximum exposure in the search engines?

Search engines, such as Google, need to be able to interpret what the video is about to correctly include it within their search results. One way to do this is to ensure that the content of the video is marked up in the body of a web page (uses coding that is recognized by the search engines). For instance, Google is able to recognize Facebook Share and Yahoo! SearchMonkey RDFa, but still has difficulty with videos that are JavaScript or Flash enabled. Using the correct code for the search engines is imperative if you want your videos to show up in places like Google’s own YouTube. As with all content you have on your website, traditional SEO practices still apply when it comes to videos. Make sure there is some descriptive, keyword rich text below the video, make sure there are unique titles and description meta tags for each of your video landing pages and allow people to post comments and share for social media and viral marketing efforts.

Of course, once the videos have been included on the site, it’s a good idea to tell the search engines where they are, so utilizing a video sitemap can be very beneficial. Once your Sitemap is created, submit it in Google Webmaster Tools or through your robots.txt file.