SEO tips for Videos

Hi everybody,

I have a question related to improving SEO on my own hosted Videos. I will be posting videos I have made on my site. These videos are hosted on my ISP (not video embeds such as youtube, etc..). So I can basically alter them any way I want. They will be FLVs mostly and I can rework the video themselves, or even change the Flash movies, etc....

Is it possible to make them SEO friendly? How would I do that?

I have read that Google was indexing Closed Caption. Also may be embedding them in link with anchor text? Or is there a special tag (with keywords) we can use in the <object> or <embed> to make it SEO friendly?

Any insight will be much appreciated - thanx a lot in advance,

Thanx.

 

Start by submitting a Google sitemap -- this way Google will know there are videos on those URLs

 

I'd provide a text summary or transcript of the video alongside the media file (visually). In the HTML source code though, I'd just create a DIV that holds the content, and then put a wrapper inside of that, and put the text in there. Then after the DIV (the first one), I'd put the OBJECT element containing the video.

Once that is done, I'll use a combination of floats and negative margins to position the video alongisde the text - not only does the user get to see the text, but the search engines can also index it before they get to the video.

Here's a basic example of the code I'm talking about:

.video-summary {
	float: left;
	margin: 0;
	padding: 0;
	width: 100%;
}

.video-summary div {
	margin: 0 400px 0 0;
	overflow: hidden;
}

<div class="video-summary">
	<div>
		<p>Your summary goes here.</p>
		<p>Your summary goes here.</p>
	</div>
</div>
<object...>
	<param...>
</object>

Code (markup):

 

Thanx a lot guys....

So there is no way to optimize the movie (FLV) itself thru closed captions or tags, or other? Too bad, that would be neat!

 

Oh, I'm sure it can be done, and would be a great idea if it can, but not everyone can see the Flash file and they'd still want to be able to know what's going on. Haivng the text present is just extra food for thought that the search engines can devour.

 

Put good article content relevant to the video, works like a charm.

The serp with see that there is a video code along with content on your page and will rank it higher.

Cheers!