7 Video SEO Best Practices That Drive Traffic

Are you looking to improve your video SEO and drive more traffic to your site? Here are 7 quick tips that can help.

1. Write Your Video Title and Description for People

Google puts importance on “writing for people” and frowns on stuffing keywords in your video title and description. Make sure you are writing titles and descriptions that are engaging and relevant to your audience, not stuffing keywords.

2. Add Tags If You Have a Video Site Map

Adding tags to your videos is a great way to organize content within the Brightcove online video platform—and it can help with SEO—but only if you have a video site map that exposes those tags to the search engines. If you have the development resources to create a simple video site map, it’s well worth the investment.

3. Use Schema Markup

Schema is a collection of HTML tags that webmasters can use to markup their pages in ways recognized by major search providers. Search engines rely on these schema tags to improve the display of their search results, making it easier for people to find the right web pages. If you use the the itemscope attribute to identify your content as a video to the search engines, it will increase your SEO results. Schema has an explanation on how to use the itemscope attribute and general instructions on using html tags to identify video.

4. Pick Quality Thumbnail Images

The editorial quality of your thumbnail trumps image quality. Put another way, choosing compelling thumbnails for your content can increase user clicks. Higher user engagement will affect your SEO results. It’s also worth noting that an image thumbnail will always get better traffic results than a generic video icon or a “click here for video” text link.

5. Incorporate Top Search Terms That Return Video Results

While you shouldn’t “keyword stuff” your video title and descriptions, certain words will increase your likelihood of being found by the search engines. Words like “video”, “show”, “how to”, “review” and “about” are all top terms that increase the likelihood your content will return a video thumbnail result. Don’t do anything unnatural, but if you can incorporate these words in your title or description (e.g. “Video tour of Aloft Brooklyn”) it can make a difference.

6. Optimize Your Website

The most flawless video SEO is worthless if your site is not optimized. It’s always a good best practice to ensure your website’s SEO is optimized before tweaking your video settings.

7. Place Videos at the Top of the Page

If you have video, put it at the top of the page. This allows search engines to understand it’s video content. It’s amazing what kind of results you’ll see from this small change.