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Get Your Videos Recognized By Google and Bing

By Lauren Bell

As more consumers take to the Web and to search engines to figure out which products to buy and services to use, searchable content has become more important to marketers trying to differentiate themselves from the competition. Video, which comScore refers to as “an increasingly effective and relevant medium to reach and engage audiences,” is quickly becoming an important method of content distribution for companies looking to grab those online consumers.  Google’s Universal Search, unveiled in 2007, has made marketers even hungrier for a surefire video SEO strategy. Universal Search shows multimedia results, meaning a video that’s optimized correctly can pull a company’s site up to the top of a consumer’s organic search results.

“We’ve watched as the volume and interest in video has grown incredibly fast,” notes Michael Cohen, product manager for video search, Google. “Because we recognized the usefulness of video to answer common search queries, we integrated video into our search results as part of our launch of Universal Search. For example, the best answer to the query, ‘How do I tie a bow tie,’ is probably not a page of text; it’s probably a video.” So, a well-optimized video on bow tie tying is likely to spring up at the top of a search.

Cohen points out that optimizing Web videos for search requires a slightly different approach than the SEO traditionally performed for text-based content. Although Google doesn’t provide detailed information on its algorithms, Cohen admits that the search engine has “absolutely” changed its formula to adjust to video.

“As video becomes more popular on the Web, it’s increasingly important for webmasters to make sure they are optimizing their video content,” he says. “While we [Google] have become smarter at discovering this information on our own, we’d certainly appreciate some hints directly from webmasters. Among other things, webmasters should be sure to create Video Sitemaps, write thoughtful titles on pages with videos, and include detailed descriptions or even transcriptions to accompany their videos. This will help our crawlers be sure we are properly indexing and interpreting video content.”

Google has published guidelines to help webmasters optimize their content, including hints focused directly on video search. Topping that list is the suggestion that webmasters submit a Video Sitemap or mRSS feed to Google. Sitemaps make it possible for Google’s crawlers to find a video in the first place. Many online videos are posted in pop-up players, which typically use Javascript — not a format that search engines can read. An XML or mRSS sitemap solves that problem.

Just like with text content, webmasters need to optimize keywords by putting them in titles and tags for each video. New videos will also help keep a site near the top of the search page. Linking to the video file itself is another good way to invite search engines to crawl the video content, says Mark Robertson, founder and publisher of ReelSEO, a VSEO information site.

“The ‘click here to download’ link that you see beneath some online videos is a cue for engines to crawl the video itself,” Robertson explains.

Both Cohen and Robertson recommend creating a unique landing page for each video on a site. As is the case with most online content, offering individual landing pages for each piece of information helps improve search results.

High-quality thumbnail images of the video, which show up on the search results page, are also important for good Google search results. Thumbnails that are at least 120×90 pixels are best.

Google also recommends directly informing the search engine if a video is removed. Using Flash player to inform site users that a video is no longer there can “confuse” search engines. Instead, return a 404 (Not found) HTTP status code for any landing page containing a removed or expired video, use a meta tag to specify the expiration date of a video, or indicate expiration dates for each video in the Video Sitemap that is submitted to Google.

Search engines are currently investing time and money into advanced recognition technologies, like speech-to-text and image recognition. This means that, in the near future, VSEO could change dramatically and become more dependent on the video itself, rather than the tags and maps that surround it. For now, though, the focus should be on creating sitemaps that let the engines find a particular video, and then supplying search engines with as much written information about the video content as possible.