SEO and Video integration

When people think of videos and the internet, most people think of the viral videos. After all, who can forget about the classic exploding whale video? Or the long-time reigning champion of Youtube, Evolution of Dance? Or that slam dunk Lebron James recently made from the free-throw line? The real question most webmasters are thinking, however, is how to utilize these videos for the benefit of their website, to draw traffic and improve their visibility, and most importantly make money. Here are a couple of basic guidelines to help your site out if you are thinking about incorporating video into your overall internet marketing strategy.

1. Do Keyword research. You don’t want to just throw up a video out there, and hope that it brings in the right traffic. Putting up a video without doing any research is like doing target practice blindfolded. Just like a website, a video will need to have a direction and focus.

2. Use titles and Descriptions. When it comes down to it, this is the most important aspect of your video, next to the video itself. Because search engines aren’t able to watch a video like we can to figure out what it’s about (yet), it relies heavily on the title and description. Make sure to fill these out, and be keyword oriented.

3. Link build. Just like any website, links have a big impact on videos showing up in search engines.

4. Mention the link. Don’t forget to post the link or mention the site as often as you can. If you can get in the description, great, but don’t forget to show or mention the link within the video itself. A couple of ideas is to show the link at the bottom of the video, and repeat, verbally, the domain several times.

As you start to implement your video strategy, remember that videos are only as good as the traffic they generate to their site. If the traffic coming from videos is poor with high bounce rates, it might be a good idea to revise the video. It’s better to get less, but more targeted traffic than to get a video with thousands of views.