Search engines can’t index video content they way they do plain text. From an SEO perspective, it can seem that video content can’t help with search engine optimization (SEO).
As it happens, there are several ways you can use video to improve your ranking in search engines…
- Get your video ranked in Google through back links
- Upload your video to a third party site with high credibility (e.g. You Tube) and work on getting it ranked
- Transcribe your video to improve indexing
Of these 3 strategies, the last is the most useful in the long term with respect to your own site. Over time, you’ll post more video content. Some of these will prove to be very useful. People will find them, and link to them from their own sites (i.e. they’ll become link bait).
The end result is increased PageRank and credibility with Google and other search engines. That benefits your whole site, not just the pages that contain your most popular videos.
The challenge is to make sure Google correctly indexes each of your videos. An excellent way to achieve that is to transcribe it and post the resulting text on the page that contains the video.
You can see an example of this technique on the following UK Pension Cash site.
As you’ll see if you visit the above site, the full content of the video is not transcribed. Instead the content has been summarised, giving a visitor enough information to get the jist of the video. And provide Google with enough words and phrases to correctly index the page.
4 Comments for SEO and Video on Your Website
Jenny Sanders | 9 March 2010 at 08:30
Peter G Simony | 9 March 2010 at 20:17
Is it not true that 67% of searches on the internet are for video clips? Does this not make the video clip one of the most powerful ways to get attention? Where else besides YouTube is it word putting videos forward to?
Jason Cobine | 10 March 2010 at 16:36
Sometimes people contact me and ask to link to my site. Should I accept all these invitations or should I be selective?


When you say “Get your video ranked in Google through back links”, what do you mean by this exactly? And how do I go about it? And does that mean the video has to be on my own site?