Video blogging is all the rage these days, and it’s not too difficult to see why. Consumers like it because it adds freshness and diversity to a website. Advertisers like it because it opens numerous doors for embedded video advertising.
And bloggers like video, of course, because of this excitement it can generate among the consumer and the digital marketing agency alike.
On an SEO front, video blogging can be good for business, too. It can bring in more traffic and a higher page rank by helping a blogger diversify his content and thus his readership base. It can attract a digital marketing agency, bring in money, and then allow the blogger or site manager to invest more in linking and page rank strategies.
It can also make for a sure-fire way to shoot up in Google’s organic search results: according to studies, a video is fifty times more likely to land on the first page of results than is a content piece of a similar nature.
So if video blogging is appropriate for your readership and for your site’s content, it may be worth incorporating a video component on your blog. Doing so should bring immediate benefits to your overall SEO, as illustrated above. But with a few easy steps you can milk video posts even further for their SEO benefit.
Here’s how:
Tip 1: Embed Your Videos
– Since watching even a portion of a video usually takes longer than skimming a piece of text, videos can lower your bounce rate and keep visitors on your site longer.
But this won’t happen if your videos are hosted on an outside site such as YouTube, and if readers seeking to watch a video are simply sent to another webpage. Make sure, then, that you can embed them into your site.
Tip 2: Add Tags and Keywords to Videos:
– A web-crawling Google bot doesn’t have the capacity to watch a video and look for keywords that can appear in a search. But it does, however, have the ability to take stock of keywords and tags that are associated with a given video.
Tagging your videos can therefore give you full reign over how a search engine perceives it, an ability that is not as pronounced when it comes to written content.
Tip 3: Make a Video Library
– You can further benefit your SEO efforts by taking all your video posts and putting them into a dedicated library section on your site. Doing so can add sophistication to your overall blog. It can also increase click-throughs by giving visitors more pages to view.
Tip 4: Give Your Videos Titles
– Google may love putting videos high up in its search results, but the engine is still text-based in nature. People search by entering words into a query, not by submitting videos. Similarly, Google finds and indexes content based upon the text that surrounds it. All this is to say that a strong, unique title can make for a vital complement to any video post.
Tip 5: Integrate Your Video With Social Media
– As with other media, video can receive an SEO boost when it garners a greater number of inbound links. One of the easiest ways to insure such links is by linking to your video posts from your social media pages — ie Facebook and Twitter. This can also serve to drive more traffic to your site.
Tip 6: Start Videos With Compelling Content So As To Lower Bounce Rates
– Bloggers and site managers can certainly achieve SEO benefits even when posting videos without superb content. But, of course, content is always king, and a video that contains quality is better-geared towards boosting SEO — especially when it starts in a compelling manner that encourages viewers to continue watching. In doing so, the video insures lower bounce rates on your site.
Tip 7: Always Keep Your Target Audience In Mind
– At the end of the day, the best long-term SEO strategy is the one that can effectively engage your loyal audience and bring more like-minded people to your site. Even while you keep these other steps in mind, then, it is always important to remember that your video posts need to find appeal with the audience you seek.
Following these tips can help you maximize your video posts for SEO purposes. You can always consult a traffic-boosting service such as Quick Sprout for further video assistance. While video posting is certainly not for everyone, it is undoubtedly a great way to easily boost your site’s SEO and hopefully increase its traffic and its content in the process.
Image Credit: Nicholas Luvaul
11 comments
Video blogging is one of the most popular ways of getting customers and readers tp a website or blog. The reason for that is that we as humans are created to see things more if they are more visual as to something just said.
As well as high traffic levels, YouTube has a very engaged audience. Comscore released data last year stating that the average user spends 311 minutes on YouTube (5 hours) per session, although I think that this is not a true representation of the average user as it is skewed by producers and others who never close their YouTube browser window. That said the active amount of time spent on site would still be higher than the majority of websites if we divided the figure by 10.
A slightly more long term view is to push users to your other content within YouTube to get them as warm to you as possible; YouTube videos can contain annotations which can be either textual or linked to other YouTube videos (but not to external sites). Therefore if you have a video that is particularly successful at pulling people into your website then you could make it a habit to link to that video through an annotation in your other videos.
Every video should have a textual description that explains what the user will see in the video. This is not only very important for helping the video to get found on the web, it is also a place where you can put a link to your website. Put a link into the first sentence of your description so that it shows up without users having to expand the description.
Video is the most strong way to make visitors spend time on your site
Agree with sona visitors spend more time on your site but video should be informative, helpful and relevant to topic. Great advice to always keep readers in mind. Thanks for sharing.
Good tips, ZK. I have not really made any good videos because I believe I am too ugly to appear in any video. Maybe I should instead get someone pretty to feature in some videos…
Anyway, would surely like to check out your videos. Any videos of yours I can check out?
It’s all about being relatable to your audience and having pretty content 🙂
Do you think I can include videos in my website to increase traffic?
Yes…you should include videos, will work well on your shopping site 🙂
I agree that video blogging is a great way to lower a blog’s bounce rate. However, the writer still needs to write engaging content to entice the readers to watch the video itself. There are some people who do not like articles that only have video to watch because they mostly prefer reading.