If you aren’t using video as part of your business marketing plan, you better change that! With the available video-sharing websites such as YouTube, Vimeo and Dailymotion, uploading short videos has never been easier.
There was a day when websites were like brochures (some still are); they were full of text-based information and maybe a few pretty pictures for eye-candy. Now, webmasters can easily embed pictures, audio and video to enhance the visitor experience.
Not only does this help in terms of keeping visitors engaged and happily browsing your website, uploading clips to video-sharing sites enhances your off-page SEO efforts. Most, if not all video-sharing sites allow a user to create a channel where profile information and links can be input. For a business, this is especially important in order to attract new visitors, but also for attracting search engine bots to crawl the profile page.
The profile on the video-sharing site can impact your website traffic, sure; but wait until you begin producing watchable content! If the videos are relevant and have good metadata, meaning that the title, description and tags define the actual video, then there’s a good chance your videos may show up in universal search engine results.
The screen shot above shows a video clip I created at Xenium for a Case Study interview with Gayle Kellman from Schoolhouse Supplies. The rectangle outline shows where the metadata goes. Notice how a link can be input into the description. You may know that back-linking is a significant factor in organic search rankings, so this is a great way to contribute to those efforts.
Above, you will see that the same video shows up in the universal search results when Gayle Kellman Schoolhouse Supplies is searched for; the results are due to the metadata that goes into the video clip.
My suggestion: if you know what specific keywords you are targeting, create videos and write the metadata according to the keywords. As far as I’m concerned, half of the people out there are readers and the others tend to be visual in terms of engaging in web content. I am a visual person, therefore I am a little biased towards creating videos, but I also realize the SEM benefits of using them in business.