All the time we hear that SEO is to be done for the user, not the search engine – which is true. Part of doing SEO is to enrich your site or blog with media content. A common form of media is video. There are many benefits your website can get from video optimization.
Decreasing Bounce Rates
Google’s recent updates showed motive to increase visibility for sites that were high quality (by Google’s standards), but in turn decreasing sites that it deemed to be a lower quality. Bounce Rate is defined by Google as “the percentage of single-page visits made prior to exiting the website”. Bounce rate is a measurement of how often your site is viewed; and a high bounce rate will generally indicate that your sites entrance page is generally less relevant to the visitors.
When you add engaging videos on your site, it can help decrease your bounce rate. By providing the potential customer with interesting content it may help them stay on the site longer and further explore, effectively decreasing your sites bounce rate. With your bounce rate decreasing Google will deem your site to be high quality.
Videos used to assist your rank
With a video on your site, you are 53% more likely to rank higher then with text alone. The reason for this is there is much less competition for video content then text content. A video that is posted on YouTube account that is linked to your site can greatly boost your site because YouTube is a MVP for Google search results, seeing as Google owns YouTube.
Videos can go viral
It’s very common for video media to go viral; it’s a new sensation that corporations are striving for with their products; one way of doing this is by making humorous and interesting commercials that viewers want to remember. Although there is a difference from a viral video then from a company video, it proves the power of content sharing and videos. By uploading video content, linked back to your site, to many different sites, (YouTube, DailyMotion, Vimeo, Metacafe) it can aid in increasing exposure to your links, and back to your site.
Using social media sites
There are many high traffic sites that you can use to link back to your site. Although Facebook and Twitter are some of the more popular sites, there are others like Reddit, Tumblr, Digg and Google+ that are common use for many potential viewers and can be worth it to invest time into. Twitter’s Vine is growing in popularity due to the fact that you can create a clip or tease of your content and link it back to your site to watch the whole video. Vine is an easy way to share content fast and you have to be engaging and creative due to the 6 second limit.
Source links
Adding a link in your videos embed code can also assist with link building. This information will link the viewer back to your site and also help move your video to the top of Google’s search results as there is now video and text content.
Video Content Creation
After creating a video, you may re-purpose it for many other content creations. A good way to do this is to have a video that introduces some ideas to the viewer, but add some text content with the video in a description or under the video that goes into more depth than the video. This allows the viewer to asses if they wish to learn more about the topic, but introduces it in a lighter dose.
There are also options to text transcripts into a PDF download. This has the ability to effectively turn a video into something closer to a PowerPoint or SlideShare presentation. Doing this you will be able to share it on SlideShare which will open doors to many more SEO benefits. Screen shots also communicate a light idea of the videos content, but still able to link back to the original video. Another medium of useful content for videos are podcasts, where it’s just audio that is listened to; if audio is acceptable for the content that is being presented.
Video can be a great and useful medium to communicate information to many viewers at once. One large benefit of video is large amounts of text can be dense and difficult to read and understand for some. Video can stimulate both the visual and auditory senses. It’s also a medium that can provide creative abilities to engage the viewer’s more wholly then just text alone.
G.K. is a writer and blogger at www.highquality-seo.com, a website that specializes in providing SEO service.
