Videos are good for SEO because they can attract users who wouldn’t otherwise find your website or hear about your brand. One strategy for attracting a bigger video audience is to upload your videos to a video-sharing site such as YouTube, Vimeo, or Metacafe. YouTube is owned by Google and also happens to be the second largest search engine, though every one of these hosting sites provides free hosting that’s easy to use.
You may want to upload a video only on your site, at first, and give it time to gain some links that can be spidered. Then, after you’ve established ownership of the video, perhaps after a couple of months, you can post it on a video-sharing site to expose it to a bigger audience.
When you post a video on YouTube or another site, follow these best practices to optimize the video for searchers:
Upload to your channel: Uploading self-produced videos to your brand channel (a customizable page with links to all the videos you’ve uploaded that interested viewers can subscribe to) lets viewers easily browse your other videos and also reinforces your branding because your company name appears prominently.
Increase brand visibility and your video’s viewing audience by uploading your videos to your brand’s YouTube (or other video-hosting site) channel.Link to your site: Entice people watching your video to visit your site by linking to your site from the video description. Also show your logo, a call to action, and your web address somewhere in the actual video.
Use keywords appropriately: Video is another form of content, so before you post it, do some keyword research and pick the keyword phrase that best represents the video subject matter. Then include the keyword in the video title, tags, and description.
Upload a transcript: Search engines can read text, so upload your written script or a transcript with your video. If you don’t have one, in YouTube you can use the closed captioning feature to automatically generate text captions.
Finally, you want to create a video XML Sitemap and submit it to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. This step helps ensure that the spiders find and index your video content quickly.
Hosting your own videos may not be the best course of action, especially if your site has limited server resources. A limited amount of bandwidth can cause a problem because videos can be very large files. You might prefer uploading videos to a third-party video-hosting site and simply pasting the provided embed code on your site where you want the videos to be viewed. Read on for more about posting videos.