Advice on Video Search Engine Optimisation

The aim of video SEO is simply to make it as easy as possible for both YouTube and Google to understand all video content. And why wouldn’t you? With Google being the largest search engine and YouTube being the second, it is more and more important that companies now factor online video optimisation into their marketing efforts.

Since Google can’t fully understand what your video is about without help (not yet, anyhow) optimising your clip currently means providing as much textual information about it. This is so that search engines can properly index it and then show it in their relevant search results.
My advice here is therefore:
Creating an optimized title is perhaps the most obvious thing to do, yet is probably one of the most overlooked. The clip title should be several words long (we tend to keep to the same 55 – 60 character range we recommend for web page title optimisation) and include the major keyword(s) you want to your video to rank for. Note: There are differing opinions on whether the keywords at the beginning of the title give more of a boost than those added subsequently… but I have found no definitive proof of this.

Description
Insert as much text as you realistically can into the description field of your clip. Add words about the video content, the people or characters, the situation or product it shows, and the usage or benefits being explained. In short… consider this a blog post and use several hundred words if possible. Obviously, any content placed in the description needs to include your targeted keywords from your SEO strategy, plus don’t be afraid to sometimes repeat keywords or derivative terms here
If your clip contains people speaking (e.g. a voice-over or some dialogue) strongly consider obtaining a transcript of the text and inserting this in the description too.
Don’t forget the transcript can also be:

1. Used to correct or improve the closed captions, which you must consider - Sure, YouTube can auto-transcribe your audio content, but not any visual content than you may also want to describe
2. Added as additional content into any web page that embeds this video clip (potentially providing some on-page SEO help too)

Video Tags
There is growing consensus in the SEO community that tags for YouTube clips have minimal optimisation benefits (but they do help with cross-linking between clips with the same tags). So still use them to describe your content in the same way you would a social media or blog post. However, remember to use those tags which highlight the uniqueness of your video (and therefore avoid very generic and therefore very competitive terms).

  

Title information

Remember to provide bespoke information about each different clip uploaded.  Don't upload the same clips with different info title & descriptions.

(Although I have no personal proof that this is "black hat" SEO activity... it does go against the very premise of what Google is trying to do. Plus, if it was suddenly treated as such... it could have a lasting negative effect.)

Comments

Encourage comments, ask for them and respond back when you do get them.

Returning to Wordpress SEO

It's been a while since I dabbled with the complexities of Wordpress, the popular website blogging platform that is now the content management system (CMS) behind so many sites.
Note: We've moved onto typically using Drupal for most decent sized sites these days, mainly because it is more of an enterprise CMS and far more stable when you have multiple users all entering and editing content at the same time.

However I had the chance to dive back into the area of Wordpress SEO very recently. This was when a new client was already in the process of having their site developed by anther agency and needed some help to ensure they got the most from their content. Luckily the web developers had used the popular Yoast Wordpress SEO plugin. This was a tool I hadn't used in at least a few years, so it was interesting to see if the popular Wordpress plugin had evolved much.

Luckily the important features are still there, primarily the ability to edit the Meta Description and Meta Title for each post and every page.
Note: Most search engines apparently no longer take any notice of Meta Keywords, which were once the first set of changes for everyone in the search engine optimisation industry. Also older site accessibility standards included some meta data a basic acceptance criteria, however Meta Keywords were not explicitly stated back then and the more recent WCAG2.0 doesn't mention the need to include any specific meta fields... phew!

Luckily the product has improved since I last use it. I really like the Snippet Preview, which gives you some indication of how your page will be displayed in search engines such as Google (however, from experience, search engines don't always take the on-page data you provide and use other sources - e.g. Alexa or http://www.dmoz.org/). Apparently Yoast has been using Linkdex for it's advanced page analysis tools for the last year or so, although this breakdown of: word count, keyword usage and relevance isn't something I've seen in my stand-alone version of Linkdex.

Overall, it's been a rewarding experience going back to something I used to do and re-learning an updated version of a popular SEO tool.

I'll try and blog about the results of my efforts when the site goes live...