How to Optimize Your Video Strategy for SEO

Video has long been considered the most engaging form of marketing content. But when it comes to SEO, many marketers run into the challenge of making sure their videos are actually seen. If you want to optimize your video strategy and improve your SEO, you need to focus on searching, indexing, and shareability.

Best Practices for Improving Your Video Marketing SEO

Choose the right platform for distribution. While posting videos directly on your website may reach your core audience, using a separate third-party video platform (such as YouTube or Facebook) can greatly expand your reach. When posting videos on these platforms, they can still be shared on your website—and they will be visible to search engines as long as their privacy settings are set to "public." Popular social media and video platforms rank very highly in search engines and are indexed quickly.

• Carefully craft a title and description. A core problem regarding video marketing is that the video itself cannot be indexed. Search engines will work solely on the content of your video's title and description, in addition to any other information (such as tags) that you add to the page. A title and description are necessary not only for SEO but also to encourage users to click on and view the video.
• Pay special attention to categories and tags. From platforms to blogs, you'll usually be called upon to appropriately categorize and tag your content. This is an excellent opportunity to hit some of the keywords and the key phrases that your video is related to.
• Provide transcripts or abstracts when posting. The more information you give alongside a video, the better. If a transcript can't be provided, an abstract of the video that hits all of its major points will still benefit the video's SEO.
• Encourage social sharing. Your video strategy will be greatly improved through social sharing. Further, links to your video through other websites and platforms will improve your search visibility.

Video marketing can be incredibly impactful, but to get the most out of them, you need to understand the challenges related to search engine optimization. Because videos are a visual and audio medium, they don't lend themselves easily to text search. With a little luck, however, you can sidestep this and ensure that your videos are searchable and shareable.

To view the original article, visit the VScreen blog.