Video used to elicit a “meh” reaction from SEO experts, because search engines ignored them. But now that search engines are learning to index videos, and since videos are rapidly increasing in popularity due to the increasing availability of broadband, you ignore video content at your own peril. Right now, the HTML surrounding your video, as well as the video’s URL, filename, title, and meta data are extremely important in getting that video to help you with your SEO goals. Character recognition, speech recognition, and image recognition are expected to mature technologically enough that someday the video content itself will be indexable. But for now, we have to deal with these SEO basics of title, keyword, URL, and meta data optimization.

Google is now attaching captions to videos, and they’ve done some already. If there are captions for a video you own, you can download, edit, and upload them, adding another layer of SEO onto your video content, because Google indexes the caption files. There’s a backlog of old videos that YouTube is working on, but you can request auto-generated captions for videos you already put on YouTube if they haven’t been generated yet. This could be a whole new dimension of video SEO, and you might as well get a jump on it. Take a look at the three screen shots for some idea of what to expect.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 6th, 2010 at 5:22 am and is filed under Marketing, Multimedia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.