Uneasy bedfellows

SEO and video have always found it hard to get along. Because search engine spiders only understand text, traditionally they haven’t been able to determine the content or quality of a video; they only understand the the links to it and the content around it, like the title or tags. As such video and SEO are uneasy bedfellows.

As video becomes less of a multimedia bauble and more of a communications centrepiece, it’s increasingly important that it is optimised for search. YouTube alone has more than one billion page views per day. Cisco Systems projects that video will represent 90% of all consumer IP traffic and 64% of all mobile traffic by 2013. And interestingly, E-commerce sites featuring product videos sell up to 45% more product, according to Internet retailer ReelSEO

There are plenty of tricks and tools out there to optimise video. Here are some ranging from the obvious to the innovative.

Some video management basics…

• Each video you upload should get its own page, therefore, its own URL.
• If you’re going to upload a lot of video, you should consider a dedicated video directory.
• Tag and title well. Videds should be given the same type of descriptive titles as any typical HTML page. YouTube, Vimeo et al. have tagging options. Use them.
• If you’re uploading video to your site – rather than to youtube, or another video site, make sure your video title and the title tag match.

That’s all pretty simple and self evident. Below are some more advanced options which can help get your video content trawled and indexed by search engines.

Sitemaps

A Video Sitemap is a link to each video, along with some additional information; title, description, thumbnail Image, that sort of thing. This info can them be displayed in search results. Here’s what google has to say on the matter.

Captions and Transcripts

Captions and subtitles appear in the video itself, along the bottom of the video window. You can see them in the video above from Google. This text isn’t embedded in the video. It’s called in from a separate file that can be searched and indexed by search engine spiders. In addition to the SEO benefits, these techniques also make the video accessible to those with hearing impairment.

You can submit your own transcript or caption files to youtube. A transcript file contains the text of what was said in the video. Happily, If the video is in English YouTube has speech processing algorithms which can determine when the words in a transcript should be displayed. A caption file contains both the text and information about when each line of text should be displayed; ie. it has a timecode.

Other companies are getting in on the act offering innovations in this area. SpeakerText helps you perform the same transcript-to-video matrimony as YouTube captions, but it also plans to roll out an interesting smart sharing service. QuoteLinks allows users to select a chunk of the transcript, copy it, and paste it in their own blog or website as a link to the exact moment in the video where the quote appears. Right now SpeakerText only works with YouTube, but the company says it plans to provide the service for other platforms in the future.

In-File Metadata

Adobe is also helping video makers optimise content through integrated metadata, which can be created automatically and supplemented manually at any stage of production. Some search engines can access this information from the file.

Adobe’s CS suite allows metadata to be added and collated right from the start of the project, Adobe Story script (available through integration with Adobe CS Live online services , While you’re recording footage directly to disk, Adobe OnLocation captures metadata coming from the camera. During post-production, you can add additional video metadata to your clips, such as file names or shot locations. Here’s an interesting demo from Adobe of this process in action.

Steve Dempsey is the social media guy at Slattery Communications.