- April 17, 2014
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Five Essential Elements of Video Optimization
Suddenly, though not surprisingly, online video is the darling of integrated marketing.
As a 2013 B2B Content Marketing Study of Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends reveals,
70% of marketers polled are using video to promote their companies. Other recent research also says that video is more influential at driving and changing behavior than ebooks, webinars and even whitepapers.
Confident Content Creators?
Perhaps being more adept at creating a savvy strategy or at ease applying pithy production pointers, marketers are feeling more confident in creating online video. Whatever the reason, we applaud the trend, believe in the potential returns, and encourage ambitious marketers to keep on keeping on.
But creating great video is still only half the battle. Real success includes getting noticed by your audience.
Optimization and Visibility
Search engines aspire to creating a customized, user-relevant experience. Google and others love video optimization because it helps them serve up content that more closely match the user’s query.
Optimizing, which is done at upload, simply means adding verbiage to titles, tags and other text fields that tell search engines what your video is about. The ultimate goal, of course, is for your videos to rank higher in the search results than your competitors’ for terms your audience uses. It’s just like optimizing your web pages, only easier.
Video has a 41% higher click through rate than plain text. — ReelSEO
Five Elements to Optimize Every Time
In a recent article, Website Magazine suggests that optimizing these five elements may help your videos rise higher and faster in the search results:
- Titles: the most important optimizable element, the title pulls double duty, informing viewers and search engines about your video’s content; keep titles concise and choose descriptive, relevant keywords; put branding information toward the end.
- Descriptions: don’t be shy; make descriptions as compelling and attention-grabbing as possible and put branding, related links and other important information at the beginning.
- Tags: tags provide one more method of describing what your video is about; they typically include keywords and search phrases your audience might use; weave these terms intelligently into your tags but never ever keyword-stuff them.
- Thumbnails: a thumbnail is a small photo, illustration or other graphic that accompanies your video to provide a visual cue as to its content; use bright, high-contrast images and make sure to follow image-sizing guidelines.
- Annotations: currently a YouTube-only feature, annotations provide yet another layer of video identification information; many marketers use them to creatively enhance (or annotate) videos with text and links.
Sharing also increases visibility. Read our previous post to see How YouTube makes video content more sharable.
If you’re really serious about video (and have some time to spare), download YouTube’s free 90-page (Content) Creator Playbook.
[SOURCES]
Digital Sherpa; TopRank Blog
