Video Optimisation: How To Appear In The Search Engine Results Pages

Video Optimisation: How To Appear In The Search Engine Results Pages

You may have noticed that in some instances, and for certain queries, video results appear in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) - these video results can then be clicked on and you land directly on the corresponding video (the video is usually created by a webmaster and hosted on a third party website, or a popular video sharing platform like YouTube). The techniques you need to use to make your videos appear in the Search Engine Results Pages aren't that difficult to implement or understand - like with most things to do with search, if you want more visibility it's about getting people to vote for your content.

The first thing you need to do is consider how you are going to actually host your video. There are various third party hosting providers e.g. Amazon S3, however on the whole you will likely be best sharing your video via a popular video sharing website (the best option is obviously YouTube).

The reason for this is because it will open your video up, potentially, to a far wider range of eyes and influencers - you want to get your video in-front of as many people as possible, after all. It's also worth remembering that up until only a little while ago, YouTube was the world's second largest search engine (it's also a Google property), behind only Google in terms of total number of searches.

The second thing you need to do is look for a video retainer - perform a quick search in the Search Engine Results Pages for your main target term, and identify whether there are currently videos displayed in the SERPs for that query. If there are, then it improves your chances that your video will be listed (if not, then you're probably better looking at an alternative query for the time being).

The next step is to actually optimise your video. Google is looking for a few things here, namely links pointing into the page on which your video is hosted, the number of times your video has been embedded on external websites, the number of times your video has been favourite (this will boost your YouTube ranking and encourage more internal YouTube links to your video content) as well as the title and description of the video.

As long as you can optimise your video content with all of these factors in mind, then you should have little to no problem making your video content appear in the SERPs for less competitive terms.

Gareth J Power is an SEO Professional. Get the best results from your SEO Campaign by reading up on SEO at SEO Manchester, the best site online for information on Search Engine Optimisation in Manchester.