How to: Optimizing Video for Search Engines

Video is an amazing medium that’s being integrated into every part of our digital lives. It’s power is enormous. The one main downfall with video though is that its hard to optimize it’s content so that search engines index it correctly.  Have no fear, here are a few tips that I’ve found that can help you better optimize your video for the web.

1. Ensure that you have a detailed description, tag and category associated with your content.

2. Create a video sitemap.  Google allows you to easily create a video sitemap in order to syndicate your video data and make it accessible in their search index.  Sign in to your Google Webmaster account, upload a few files to your site and add the appropriate metadata such as description, title and duration to the video index.

3. If available, add your closed caption file or annotations.

4. Submit your video to multiple services. TubeMogul.com is a great place to start.

5. Use relevant keywords in the video’s URL and associated landing page.

6. Listen to your analytics.  Both YouTube and TubeMogul have a decent set of video analytics.  See where users are tuning in and tuning out.  Optimize to your strengths.

If you’re willing to pay to have your videos shown for certain search queries in YouTube, then you may want to try Google sponsored videos. It works very similar to adwords (actually you can tie it to your adwords account) in that you bid on certain keywords to promote your videos or products within search results on YouTube.