Video search: seeing is believing
Posted by Lauren Potgieter on 06 Nov 2009 | Tagged as: Common SEO Topics, Social Media
I love to watch videos that I find in search results. Happy or sad, extremely funny or disturbing, I feel that watching these videos, whether they are circulating memes or rare clips, give you a short break from the world for a few minutes until you are rushed back to reality only to realise that you were probably doing something fairly constructive before you clicked on that particular link. I have heard that you can only concentrate on about 20 minutes of reading/studying/research until you need a break. On good days this number seems like a breeze but on bad days 20 minutes can feel like an eternity. Either way, videos can give one a visual break from endless pages of search content, but are people really using videos and using them properly in order to direct the public to their products and services?
I feel that video searches are underestimated by the public, marketers and SEO’s in general. People are slowly becoming more familiar with seeing video entries at the top of their Google searches and many of us feel that, especially in South Africa, people don’t click on these clips because of our dismal bandwidth. Since the implementation of Universal Google search in 2007, video clips have been popping up more and more, especially in terms of news and entertainment.
Recent studies completed by industry analyst and market researcher Nate Elliott showed us that video clips are 53 times more likely than text to show up on the first page. Elliot went on to say that even though some marketers use video clips, less than 20% of them place keywords inside the filename and include keywords in their captions.
Optimising your video clips and content is one of the easiest ways to get your content ranked and many seem to overlook this, favouring traditional text. We all watch videos on the internet and I know many people who prefer to watch news clips or video tutorials instead of trying to decipher the information through a long and boring document.
Videos are not an instant cure to your search problems, however. You have to make sure that the keywords are relative and that your content is of high value and original. So, how do you do this? A few suggestions from Elliot are to place your videos on YouTube as well as on your own site. Other steps you can take are to write keywords pretty much everywhere including the title and tags and create a nifty little video library for your videos.
As “blended search” (search that incorporates all forms including text, videos, maps, news and more) becomes even more popular, it is recommended by industry experts that everyone jumps on the video bandwagon before it sets off into the SEO sunset.
