Does it make sense to add ALT tags to a video, to help search engines understand what they are - or does this tactic not work? Is there any way to apply SEO to videos?
the proper attribute you should be adding is the title attribute... more info here: searchenginepanel.com/the-often-overlooked-title-attribute/
Title tags are a great way to place additional keywords on a page, totally whitehat, too. You shouldn't stuff the same keyword in it 10 times, but having a description of the videos there is a good idea for sure.
It's often overlooked (and pretty obvious) but the text you put before and after the videos on your page can make a huge difference to your SEO results. I have pages on my site where I've embedded YouTube videos and I rank higher than the both the YouTube page for the video and the site of the person who submitted the video for keyword phrases related to that video. The only difference is my pages have highly targeted text before and after the video (ultimately search engines still love text and combining text with videos does seem to attract them). It's a little different to your question but... If you're uploading your video to YouTube and other video sites you'll get much better SEO results for your video there if the title of your video and your video file name matches some kind of long tail keyword phrase. That will often get your YouTube page with the video ranked at or near the top of google for the keyword phrase you use. Kindest regards, Andrew Cavanagh
Thanks for the feedback. Andrew - that is really interesting. I might use some H3's before the videos I put up, which are already listed under an H2. Do you think ALT or TITLE can be applied to the < embed> code? If so, would the syntax be < embed alt="text here"> ?