Smart Tips for Optimizing Videos for Better SEO and Increased Website Speed

[guest post by Brian Anders]

You can use videos to showcase your product, to demonstrate how it is used, or even to boost your content marketing. But how does this work for your SEO and your website loading speed? Here are the smartest tips for ensuring that everything works as well as possible.

Optimize for keywords

There are lots of ways to improve your website SEO, but most of them focus around keywords. That’s why it makes a lot of sense to use keywords when optimizing your video. Think about the video title, the file name before you upload it, and any description that you are able to add. Use keywords just as you would with pictures added to your site. Focus on relevance to be sure that your video will push your search engine ranking higher.

You can also include a transcript of anything that is said in the video. All of the words in the transcript will work to add to your optimization, providing extra keywords and plenty of concurrence. This is when lots of similar keywords appear together, letting Google know that your content is relevant to the topic at hand.

Choose your platform

Yes, there are a lot of video platforms out there, and many of them appeal to different audiences. But YouTube is the easiest to use, and offers you plenty of room to optimize in various areas of your upload. Plus, it’s owned by Google. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to work out that YouTube videos will rank more highly than other platforms. You could host on your own website, but it’s not advisable. This will just slow down your page loading times and put too much of a burden on your server.

You can embed your YouTube video onto your website and have a much faster loading time guaranteed. You might even be able to monetize it by adding adverts. So, YouTube allows you to get a faster loading time, which in turn boosts your SEO, and also boosts your SEO further with keywords – and gives customers a new way to find you by searching on YouTube itself. It seems like a real no-brainer.

Keep them short

Short videos make for more shareable content. In 2012, the average video length for the most shared ads around the world was just over four minutes. These days, that has come down even further, with the likes of Vine and Snapchat forcing us to cut our message much shorter. Take advantage of this and grab the short millennial attention span with snappy content. Get your point across as quickly as possible and you will find more people enjoying and sharing your content.

Plus, your viewers are more likely to watch the video again and again when it’s short enough to keep going through it. The more views you have, the more popular your video looks, and search engines will pick up on this to push you higher up the rankings.

Create backlinks and social shares

Having your video hosted on YouTube gives you the chance to put a backlink to your article or page in the video description. This in itself will boost SEO, and also increase your traffic. When viewers get to your page, make sure that you encourage them to share it. The more social shares you have, the better your article will rank.

This is all part of driving more traffic to your site, too – if customers can’t find you in their searches, they might spot your content on social media instead. If you have only just created your YouTube channel in order to host your video, remember to set up your YouTube channel as well. You can include backlinks in your profile that point back towards your website.

** About the Author: Brian Anders is a passionate Senior Communications Specialist with over nine years of experience in helping companies communicate clearly and efficiently with their customers. Currently, Brian is supporting Zintel – phone management services experts.