How to optimise videos

There are many avenues that will gain traffic for your site, and one of these just happens to be video. This method is becoming very popular as videos are more attractive than traditional adverts.

Why use a video?

Adding a video to your website has never been easier due to the number of sites available which allow you to easily upload, embed or share them.

Using videos is a way to make your website stand out from the rest.

Videos enable you to grab a user’s attention more quickly compared with using numerous pictures and/or text. Larger amounts of information can be conveyed to the user in a shorter space of time.

Demonstrations or tutorials are frequently used to help engage users with the products available and it helps you to build a relationship with your users. This is essential if you want them to return to your site.

Video optimisation:

Search engines now allow users to search a large number of videos on sites such as YouTube, and so when using videos for your site it is important to think about how Google ranks them.

Many of the video ranking factors are the same as for natural search. These include the video title, description, age as well as inbound links. Other ranking factors which are more specific to videos are its ratings, the number of views, and how many times it has been embedded into sites.

Before Google can rank your video, it first needs to be included within its index. One way to achieve this is through the use of a video XML sitemap, which simply includes a link to the location of your video along with a thumbnail image to appear in the search results.

Ensuring your videos are fully optimised, this will help your site to make the most of them, ultimately helping to generate more traffic to your site.

Gemma Neesham
SEO Manager