How to optimize your videos for SEO techniques, tricks, and SEO-friendly strategies for videos |

If a photograph can be worth a thousand words, how much is a video worth? To search engines it's "a lots."

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the process of increasing your content's visibility in the eyes of search engines such as Google, Bing, and other search engines.

In today's competitive world of SEO for video providing the correct set of data to engines is critical in helping viewers find and be able to connect to the video content that you have worked so hard to make.

Let's look behind the often-obscure curtain of SEO and let more eyes happily stumble upon your next video.

Best SEO techniques and video tips for SEO. practices

1. Be intentional regarding your title

The title will usually be the text at the top that appears when you search. While it's great to come up with a distinctive and appealing title for your video, it's also crucial to make your name informative by with keywords. The more broadly descriptive your title and the more likely it is that your video will be found in search results for these words.

Search results typically are cut off approximately 65 characters. So be sure to front load your title using the most crucial keywords.

2. Leverage what other people are searching for

If you're looking for new audiences to see your film, it makes sense to describe it in the terms that people are searching for.

Though the video was published over a decade ago "Hayako" is still able to hold an enviable, highly competitive place in the top spot of search results on Google, proving the power of a search-optimized video title.

However, it's essential not to put random words into your video's title just for the sake of appearing on a lot of search results. (Pro-tip: this hardly ever is successful). If your video title and description do not accurately reflect the content of the videos, then search engines may penalize you.

What is the typical lengths of video descriptions?

• YouTube The description field can be as long as 1,000 characters.
• The characters can include up to 5,000 characters
• Google is able to reduce the description of any video (or article) to 155 or 160 characters

3. Don't undervalue the importance of a well-written description for video SEO

It's the description "blurb" which will typically be displayed in search results beneath your name. Your description should begin with an opening line that grabs the audience's attention immediately remembering that only the first 110 characters or so will appear before the description gets truncated in search results.

Beyond the first 100 or so characters, use the rest of the descriptions to tell viewers about the video with greater detail. Give credit to your crew and cast and note down the tools you used to shoot and edit the film and mention any other essential aspects of making your video.

Descriptions are also a great place to include hyperlinks for your social media pages or website. Though these might not help the search results, your collaborators, viewers and followers can utilize this information to follow your work on other channels.

Not a copywriter? That's okay. The most unprofessional description is one that is not complete. Make sure you convey the most important ideas about the video before adding any important terms you feel the viewers are looking for.

4. Embed video on your site to gain additional benefits

It's not a good idea to overload a landing page with too many video clips, as Google will not know which is the most significant among them all to show. If you're embedding videos that are stunning on your website, ensure to limit it to one for each page.

Your video's page placement is also important for how search engines will crawl your video. Ideally, your video should be near the top of the page.

Video clips that appear "below the fold," just like results from search on the second page of Google, are often forgotten about , which is certainly not something you'd like to happen in order to gain greater reach.

5. Include a video transcription

The transcription of video content is an essential element of video SEO. It offers Google additional information regarding the video's content, thus improving your chance of appearing higher in search results.

Google will be able to access the bytes from your video in order to determine the video's content and the spoken language. However, if you have made a transcription manually of the speech on your video, providing a transcript can assist search engines to understand the spoken words more precisely. In case of doubt, provide more context instead of less.

Video transcripts also help your content be more easily usable, which is a constant to artists and creators of all trades.

6. Apply nail to your thumbnail

A gorgeous thumbnail is crucial when it comes to mobile (whether that's on a internet browser or an in-app) as well as high-end (OTT) watching the place where your video's description and thumbnail serve as your primary way of contacting potential viewers.

Text can be included in the thumbnails or let the image be the main focus. We've seen both methods work well.

With its beautiful colors and a classy, simple cover "Calbuco" presents a mesmerizing thumbnail that entices you to click through:

Sometimes your thumbnail needs an explanation or explanation to lure the attention of viewers, and that's okay. You can add a subtitle your thumbnail, and showcase your achievements in film to increase the interest of viewers:

One trend we've noticed on the subject is that thumbnails with color are more likely to have higher rate of click-through than black and white ones. That being said, sometimes it's best to make an aesthetic preference over an decision-making process.

White and black are as attractive as colors, particularly if your thumbnail captures that perfect moment mid-action.

Beware of these common thumbnail errors:

• Blurry action pictures
• Text that competes with the picture, or is hard-to-read
• An image that is stretched or pinched
• There is no thumbnail

Your video SEO glossary

Here are a few terms of the SEO trade that you may not be aware of:

 Algorithm

This is not like the Instagram or Facebook algorithms that we read about so often But an evolving Google algorithm for search which signals which factors are necessary for a website to be suitable for ranking. Think of elements like relevance to the search query, its usability as well as the quality of website's content, and so on.

Actually, Google search algorithms are an intricate web that was created to ensure that the most relevant results shoot into the top spot of the page.

 Crawl  

The practice that Google "crawling" the website is merely how the search engine gathers data. The "crawler" perpetually navigates the web for new pages, logging these new websites and the data they have (including videos!) as something that can be used for search results.

 Rich snippets

An rich snippet of videos is the thumbnail preview which shows on desktop and mobile Google results. Each video you host on .com We provide metadata that are appropriate that will help the video's preview show up on Google and the other search engines.

Why do rich snippets matter? The organic search results page is the lifeblood of many websites and companies, and these short snippets can give you an edge up on standard listings.

They offer a compelling link to your video with an image that is still or a moving preview that increases the organic rate of click-through (CTR) and results in higher viewers.

"SERP"

An abbreviation to mean "search results page of the engine." If you type in a search for something, Google responds with a SERP that answers your question.

 structured data

Structured information(or microdata) is a common method of telling search engines how to index content on a webpage. By providing the right set of structured data, allows your hosted videos to be displayed in search results as rich snippets.

Other important forms of structured data automatically provides that are essential for both SEO and social media marketing:

• Schema.org is a common set of definitions that define structured data that is which is supported by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Yandex
• Open Graph, Facebook's markup uses to decide what info and images are automatically displayed when a page is shared in an article
• Twitter Cards are markups that draw from videos, images, and even text. It displays them in a 'card' each time a page is tweeted out all over the world

To see all the video microdata that is automatically created by , just enter the URL of a YouTube video using Google's test tool for structured data.

It's time to dip your toe into the vast sea of SEO. While the video SEO process is just an aspect of the larger marketing strategy for your videos The process isn't difficult to implement meaningful changes in your video content.

There's no doubt that the marketing industry must use video at every stage of the journey of a consumer, whether that's gaining visibility through websites like and Facebook to create a stronger bond with your brand or embedding videos onto your website to help educate customers and drive sales.

Still, simple steps -including optimizing your titles or writing a well-thought out summary -- could help in attracting attention from the search engines to your site.