Improving Your Search Engine Rankings With Video

Improving Your Search Engine Rankings With Video

The task of improving your search engine rankings is a never ending one or so it seems. The problem, of course, is as soon as you think you have it figured out along comes something like the Google Panda update. Fortunately, there is a new trend that seems like it will have staying power.

Google's View

Imagine you are an employee at Google in charge of the ranking algorithm. You know there are thousands of people out there, actually tens of thousands, who are trying to figure out how to game your work. Even worse, they seem to be succeeding. Despite your best efforts, there is a bunch of spam in the top 10 rankings for many of the major keywords.

The question is what can you do about it? Links are obviously going to remain important, but there must be other factors that can be used to gauge the merits of sites. We all know that Google supposedly looks at 200 ranking factors, but the truth seems to be that most of them carry nominal weight. There is, however, one big factor that does matter - the quality of your site.

Quality is one of those incredibly vague words like "reasonable". What exactly does it mean? Well, after Panda it appears to mean the level of the user experience on your site. The better the experience, the more juice your site is given in the rankings. Ah, but how do you measure quality? Google seems to do it by looking at things like bounce rates and time spent on the site. If people are leaving your site quickly, you have a problem. This is where video comes in.

Video

Most people discuss the video and SEO relationship as one where videos can drive traffic to your site or generate high quality links. While this is all true, I am more interested in how videos can improve the user experience on your site. Simply put, videos lend themselves to people staying on a site for much longer than just text offerings and the longer they stay, the better your rankings.

So, how do you implement video into your site? Well, blowing out a multimillion dollar set of videos with Ridley Scott at the helm would be great, but none of us can afford it. That doesn't mean we can't do simple things to make a difference. A really simple one is to convert your articles into videos. For a television generation, this can be the difference between someone staying on your site for five to 10 minutes or clicking away after just a few seconds. Time is money and this expense of time could really help you.

Staying Power

I am a big fan when it comes to using video to get people to stay on a site. The truth of the matter, however, is practically anything can work so long as it meets the requirement of keeping people around so start experimenting with your site today.