Saturday, December 20, 2008

Video SEO: Here to Stay

The use of video’s to promote your online content is becoming more and more important in the expanding world of search engine optimization. With the growth of video portals such as You Tube it has never been easier to get your videos on the web.

Why use Video SEO?

1. Video on independent websites seem to be quickly and heavily indexed and ranked by the major search engines.

2. Including videos adds additional ways to optimize for your keywords and phrases. By adding content relevant to your keywords and phrases, combined with the related videos, will add weight to your site and its content.

3. The video content can be duplicated on 3rd party website such as you tube without any duplicate content penalties.



4. Allows for more text and pages to optimize your keywords and phrases around. Be sure to surround videos with relevant on-page content.

5. Embedding videos in your site pages is a great way to increase the stickiness factor of your pages, which can increase both traffic and search rankings for a specific page. Google and most search engines use a variety of factors to determine the ranking importance a specific page online, one of which is average visitor session length on a page. Visitor length on a page can be increased by embedding a video. These longer site visits may be interpreted by Google that the page has increased value and in turn may be given a bump that translates into higher search engine rankings.

6. Choosing a video that is themed to your content and informative can help with the stickiness factor – you need to give the search engines something to crawl. Adding an irrelevant video for the sake of adding a video will just confuse your visitors.

7. Videos help in adding new, fresh and dynamic content to the site.

When thinking about SEO, you need to extend beyond your traditional web pages, blogs, and photos. Videos are part of today's marketing mix. Be sure to focus on video optimization to round out your SEO efforts.

This post adopted from Caroline Rodgers of Biznet IIS. Caroline Rodgers, SEO Executive, Biznet IIS.

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