How to Successfully Use Video SEO to Your Advantage

Video SEO is becoming more prominent than ever in the Internet marketing world. In fact, videos are 53 times more likely than traditional Web pages to receive an organic first-page ranking.Today's society loves to view and share online videos and it is not uncommon for a person or brand to become well-known or famous from a video that went viral.

What is video SEO?

Video SEO is a set of techniques designed to make sure that search engines find and index your video content. Video SEO also helps to make sure search engines display your video content when specific keywords are entered as search terms.

Think about how the right video and the right SEO techniques could help get your brand ahead of the competition. Using video SEO to your advantage is easy; the hard part is coming up with an idea for a video that will catch on like wildfire. Your video can be actual video footage, screen captures, slide shows or animated PowerPoint slides. Whatever you choose, it’s important to keep it short, simple and entertaining. Making it funny or interesting is your best bet if you want people to share your video with friends and family (which you do).

Once you come up with an idea, here are some tricks of the trade for using video SEO to launch your short movie straight into success:

• Upload your video to YouTube. Since Google owns YouTube, uploading your video to this platform will guarantee it gets indexed into Google's search engine. YouTube also offers an easy way to add video SEO to your content.

• If you choose to have your video hosted on your Website, make sure to submit your video to Google using a Video Sitemap using Google's Webmaster Tools. Also make sure you have a robots.txt file on all of your video pages to ensure that Google can find the Web page and verify that there are codes on it that indicate that a video is present.

• Include title, description and tags. When you submit a video to YouTube, the site allows you to provide a title, description and tags. Make sure to use keywords in each of these in order to ensure that your video pops up in the search results when a certain search term is typed in. If your video is on your Website, make the title tag of the video the same as the title tag of the page it’s on. Google likes this and will reward the video with higher search results when this is done.

• Target long tail keywords. You'll see better search results if you target long tail keywords in your video. This means you need to get more specific with your keywords. Don't just name your video "Salon." Name it "Hair Salon Stylist Shows How to Do Prom Up-do." A long tail keyword is more likely to produce first page results than a generic short keyword. Since Google can't actually see the content of the video, you could actually submit the video a few different times with different titles. This would allow you to cover all potential search term matches.

• Remember that when it comes to video SEO, just because you're new or a small business, doesn't mean you can't earn top rankings. When it comes to regular SEO for Websites, a new or smaller site may not be able to achieve the same rankings a site that's bigger and has been around longer can achieve. However with video SEO that all goes out the window. Someone who has posted 5 videos has just as much of a chance of reaching top search results as someone who has posted 1 video, as long as the proper video SEO steps have been taken.

Over time, the competition for videos will become even denser. However, right now since there are so many more Website pages online than videos, it's very easy for videos to rank higher in the search results without as much effort. For now, it's important to take advantage of this and maximize the amount of videos online to gain brand recognition and drive traffic to your Website. Nowadays it's very likely for a video to go viral in a matter of days, which is why if you haven't been taking advantage of online videos, the time is now. Start brainstorming ideas for fun and informative videos and you'll increase brand awareness and sales in no time.