Video Optimisation

Following on from my fellow blogger Isriel’s post, I shall be going into a few tips on how to optimize for video content, as part of your entire search engine optimisation strategy.

When optimising for video, the following are perhaps a few steps that might have been looked over or missed, that can lead to greater video search domination. Note that these are general video search optimisation techniques and may or may not fit your current overall SEO strategy.

Video mark-up
To improve the probability of the Big G and other search engines indexing and including your video landing pages in the organic search results, remember to optimize the video mark up formats. The two main formats are Facebook share and Yahoo SearchMonkey RDFa. More information can be found here:

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=162163

The following images are what the code for the Facebook markup and Yahoo SearchMonkey RDFa would look like:

Facebook Share video markup format:

Yahoo SearchMonkey RDFa markup format:

Submit video sitemap
Once you have added the video markups, it’s time to submit the video site map to the search engines so they know the video landing pages exist. Hopefully, the spiders will then crawl, index and rank your video pages.

Above the fold
A lot of web sites still fail to realise (or realised but haven’t implemented) that including video above the fold is a double edged miracle worker; in terms of usability so that the customer does not have to scroll down to the video, and in terms of optimisation where you are placing more important content closer to the top of the page.

Promote and promote and promote your videos
You must take an active role in promoting and marketing the videos you have on your site, increase the number of views to the videos, encourage more people to comment on the video and allow visitors to rate the videos that they have seen. Once a visitor has finished watching a video, you can then prompt them with a list of other videos that they can also watch.

We human beings are a curious bunch. In addition to searching for and watching interesting and entertaining videos, we love to share a lot of the videos we enjoy. Therefore, if you do not have it, make sure you make it a priority that your videos can be shared throughout the web. This builds up brand presence and can draw free, natural and quality backlinks to your page.

Some examples of video sites you can share videos on are:

This summarises a few points marketers can take away and implement to existing videos. This list is not exhaustive, so do not forget to perform other very important tasks in video optimisation such as keyword,competitor research and so on.

Till next time fellow readers!

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