Editor’s note: In the following guest post, Fliqz CEO Benjamin Wayne reveals some of the secrets of using video to help boost the search results rankings of your website. Fliqz is an online video platform.
As most search engine optimization (SEO) experts are aware, getting a first-page Google result is harder than ever. Not only do Google’s search and indexing algorithms continue to evolve in complexity, but Google has given over more and more of its search results real estate to “blended” search results, displaying videos and images towards the top of the first page, and pushing down—and sometimes off the page—traditional web results that would have otherwise competed for top rankings.
But where problems arise, so do opportunities. Although Google’s newfound enthusiasm for video has created more competition for fewer traditional search results, it has enabled sites with video assets—even sites that would otherwise score poorly in the Google index—to successfully achieve first-page rankings. In fact, Forrester Research found that videos were 53 times more likely than traditional web pages to receive an organic first-page ranking.
Here’s what a blended search result looks like for the search query “777 built in 4 minutes“:
Those images at the top of the search results are video thumbnails, and today, there’s only two ways to get there:
1. Upload your video to YouTube.
The advantage of this is that you are 100% certain to be indexed into Google’s search engine. This does not guarantee you’ll get a first-page result, but at least it ensures that Google knows your content exists.
The drawback, of course, is that anyone who clicks on a YouTube result will be taken to YouTube, which may be fine if your goal is branding (i.e., you only care that people watch your video). If your goal is driving traffic, as is typically the case with SEO, this won’t be a successful strategy.
Your other alternative is:
2. Video SEO
Video SEO is a set of techniques designed to make sure that:
Here’s how to make it work:
You Need Video Content
Google is fairly flexible in what it considers to be video content. You can use actual video footage, but screen captures, slide shows, animated PowerPoint slides, and other content will work just as well. Google can’t actually “see” what’s inside the video content, so it relies on title and other meta-data to determine what content your video actually contains.
Submission, Not Discovery
With traditional web pages, Google utilizes crawlers to discover and index web content. Unfortunately, Google can’t read Flash very well (although it is trying), and as a result, most video content is invisible to Google’s search crawlers. Therefore, the best way to appear in Google’s blended search results is to submit your video to Google using a Video Sitemap. This is similar to an XML sitemap, but is formatted specifically for video, and only contains information about your video content. It is submitted using Google’s Webmaster Tools.
The most common error in Video SEO is to assume that because you have submitted the web page on which a video resides, that the video content itself is being indexed.
You’ll also need to make sure that you have a robots.txt file on all video pages, to ensure that Google can easily verify that the locations on the Web you’ve submitted do in fact exist, and that they contain embed codes which indicate the presence of a video.
Title and Title Tags
When ranking videos, Google primarily considers the match between search keywords and the video title. Although Google allows you to submit other meta-data such as description and keywords, these currently don’t have much influence on your search ranking. Google likes it when the title tag of the page matches the title of the video, and will give a higher weighting for results where this is the case.
Video SEO is Long Tail
Like traditional SEO, you’re much more likely to see results with Video SEO if you target more specific, or longer tail, search terms. A video titled “Dog” is unlikely to produce a first-page ranking, while a video titled “German Shepherd Police Dog” will be more likely to score well in Google’s algorithm. Since Google can’t determine the actual content of the video, you might consider submitting the same video multiple times with different titles that match potential search terms.
New and Small Don’t Matter
With traditional SEO, the age of a website is an important consideration for Google in deciding its ranking. Google also considers things like the number of pages on the site, and the number of links to the site, along with the importance of the places those links originate.
In Video SEO, none of this matters. This means that even new sites and small sites can compete on equal footing with larger and more established players. Publishers who are too small or too new to even consider traditional SEO can still be taking advantage of Video SEO opportunities.
For the Foreseeable Future, Video SEO is a Winning Strategy
As time goes by, Google’s discovery and indexing of video content will no doubt become more sophisticated, and as competition for video results increases, it will become harder for sites to achieve these first-page rankings. However, the number of web pages still massively outnumbers indexed video assets, and for as long as that continues, publishers will have an opportunity to jump to the top of Google’s search results through Video SEO.
Moderator: Vanessa Fox, Contributing Editor, Search Engine Land
Speakers:
Sean Carlos, CEO, Antezeta Web Marketing
Richard Chavez, SEO Director, iCrossing
Maile Ohye, Senior Developer Programs Engineer, Google Inc.
Jonah Stein, Founder, ItsTheROI
Jonah just asked if any livebloggers were in the audience and I raised my hand. I’m being rewarded with his slides! Yay!
Maile’s up first with the lay of the land.
Agenda:
Domain Names
Geotargeting priorites with Google:
Neither are really preferred for the Google index. They work equally well. It just depends how you want to service your customers.
Server Location
Magic signals (can override some of the above) one example is if they’ve extracted a physical address from your home page, then they might over write the other settings, but this is extremely rare
The next slide is crazy but she says they’re going to have a blog post on the Google Webmaster Blog that explains it all in detail:
Next is some jazz…
Paginated Content
Existing “view all” pages can have a rel=”canonical” from paginated URLs:
Next is parameters. Google advocates standard encodings, which means name/value pairs. Create algorithmically easily understood name/value pairs for dynamic URLs. Duplicates can be detected this way. The crawling is done more efficiently if they understand you can throw out the parameter. On the other side of the same coin, avoid maverick encodings. They are difficult to detect the similarity and that means duplicates will be crawled.
Set your parameter preferences in Webmaster Tools. You definitely don’t want to do it wrong because you could tell Google to ignore something important.
Roll Like a Winner: An Example
January 3, 2010
Web site with standard encodings:
Google is aware of 1,587,811 URLs on the site
Google attempted to crawl 885,482 URLs
On January 4, 2010
The webmaster set their preferred parameters in Webmaster Tools. After this configuration, Google was aware of 887,203 URLs, not 1.5 million. They attempted to crawl 799,000ish. That means crawl coverage is at 90 percent versus the 56 percent from previously.
The index selection increased by thousands. Likely fewer filtered results and more unique content.
Next up is Richard.
Load Balanced Hosting – What and Why
What: Load-balanced hosting enables site traffic to be distributed to a site that is hosted on more than one redundant server.
Why: Sites that generate high amounts of traffic often require advanced hosting solutions to maintain site stability. Overloading a server with large amounts of traffic can cause it crash.
SEO Challenges from Load-Balanced Hosting
In many instances you’ll see the server numbers displayed in the URL. The main issue with this is the duplicate content, which can impact rankings. End-users and bots should see the same version of the URL at all times.
Ghosting URLs
Always displaying the same sub-domain to all audiences. Some options:
Pros:
Displays the preferred URL to all audiences
One execution
Cons:
Requires complex technology implementation
Can be difficult to retro-fit
Search Engine Tag Protocol
Leverage the rel=”canonical” tag to direct bots to preferred version. This is easy to implement and is supported by all major search engines. However, it’s not guaranteed. It can take a long time to implement and sometimes link equity from duplicate URLs doesn’t always pass.
Search engine webmaster tools can relieve a lot of the technical implementation. When you do this you must also have the removal command in the robots.txt file.
Key Takeaways
Next is Sean. The domestic US market is mostly where are clients are. But in Google, the English speaking world stretches from New Zealand to the UK. There are considerations for organizing multilingual and multinational web site content. The two dimensions are language and technology. Ways to organize content, in Sean’s preferred order:
Considerations driving a domain/URL strategy
Search engines try to guess the intended market a site is trying to reach. They’ll figure this out with country codes or server IP for generic domains.
Influence of incoming links: search engines will likely consider the “location” of sites providing incoming links when ranking a page for a particular market
Users scan search result URLs
Multiple studies have noted users scan URLs when deciding which result to select. Users probably prefer their country specific domain in search results.
Last the pros and cons of each solution:
Jonah is next with pagination decisions you should not ignore. There are going to be some assumptions up front:
PageRank doesn’t flow out of a page equally. It flows to the links that Google thinks the page likes most. Where the links are placed and where they’re in the page does matter.
Pagination can fail and here are some examples. Yahoo! results will drop PageRank from page one to page 2.
GreatSchools.org Case Study
They do unbiased school ratings for public and charter schools. They did recently change from .net to .org but it doesn’t seem to have screwed anything up. They have a geo-driven hierarchy and pagination of browse pages. In 2009 they had 10 entries per page and the pattern was a odd shaped drop around the 37 page mark. Then they moved to 25 entries per page and there’s a pretty clean step down graph. By sorting the results differently you can see that most PageRank was being passed closest to the browse page.
There’s an alternative way to push PageRank through a site. Hierarchical distribution with links in footer.
Takeaways
Jonah’s made his presentation on pagination available to all!
Vanessa asks Maile a question about AJAX crawling, which just launched yesterday. Check it out on Google Code.
Dealing With Domain Names, URLs, Parameters & All That Jazz – Technical SEO Tactics was originally published on BruceClay.com, an SEO services company.
