Video SEO

Metadata:

It is imperative to provide well-placed, rich and relevant metadata that can be easily located by search engines. Also, you should apply it each and every time your content goes onto a new service or is converted to a new format. When creating metadata, you should be aware that metadata is often lost during conversion.

Filename:

If you are linking to a specific file that is hosted on a web server, ensure the file name is a sensible and descriptive one, ideally with hyphens or some other form of separating character in between words. For example, use “full-rotation.wmv” rather than “videoofrotation.wmv”.

Tags:

Tags are growing as a facet of search and navigation, both for video and the Internet as a whole.  If you use a video sharing or hosting system such as YouTube, you will generally be given the opportunity to provide tags. Unfortunately, many video sharing sites suffer from prevalent tag abuse problems.  (tag pollution)

Sitemap:

Most video search engines allow the provision of a sitemap, starting-point URL or RSS feed.  This is used to provide the engine with a simple list of URLs that point to individual pages that host video. If the sitemap is being provided within an RSS feed, you can then also provide metadata in the RSS feed itself. 

What to avoid:

Flash-only and entirely dynamic players: Some sites have content played entirely in Flash or some other dynamic Web technology. These sites are difficult to spider, extract information from and, most crucially, make it very difficult to tell individual videos apart. In general, it is much better to have your videos in an easily accessible form – whether an RSS feed, directory with an accompanying sitemap or simply a one-video-per-page HTML hierarchy that can be easily spidered from a root URL.

That’s all for now.  Stay tuned for my next post on Image SEO.