1. You may already be aware of the search engine optimization advantages you can get from adding
video content to your website. If you didn't get the memo on this, Google started shifting its algorithms
a couple of years ago towards something it calls universal search. It doesn't just give you a list of
websites that correspond to your news stories. When Google can find news or video content that
matches your search terms, it will display that content as well.
This is where it gets interesting.
Google displays the videos it selects “above the fold” on the search results page, so that if your video is
selected it will often rank higher in the listings than the text pages on your website, no matter how well
you tweak them. And since much of the video content on YouTube is barely optimized, with missing
tags and non-descriptive titles totally lacking in keywords, the odds of your video getting selected are
actually quite good if you take a few steps to let Google know about it.
So you want a keyword-rich title and tags and and a detailed caption and description, and you want to
have a transcript of your video as well. Google's web spiders can't understand video formats, but will
associate video with whatever clues it can glean from your video title and description. Putting up video
transcripts for SEO gives them more to work with. Providing that information to Google is worth the
effort so transcribe your videos and upload your transcripts.
Consider what you can gain from using video transcripts for SEO. If your keywords in fact represent
your content, they will naturally appear multiple times in your transcript, simply because they describe
your topic. So the keyword density of your content increases in a natural way, so even if it's quite high
you don't have to worry about Google penalizing you for keyword stuffing. It does penalize websites
now when it catches them engaging in black-hat hocus pocus.
But this is just your content. All of it. Convenient that it contains so many of your keywords, though,
isn't it? Using video transcripts for SEO optimization works very well if your site is the sort of genuine
content that Google has been adjusting its algorithms to identify. You should ignore those who advise
putting the transcript in your source code for exactly this reason. It's your content. You should be proud
of it. Put it in your description!
One problem with video for SEO though is that with all the user traffic on YouTube, hosting your video
there and just letting Google worry about the bandwidth is very tempting. But a YouTube video
embedded on your website will take your users to YouTube. This does not do much for keeping the
visitors you worked so hard to attract on your own site. There is a service called SpeakerText that
creates video transcripts that link back to your own site, and it may be worth a look.