As we near the end of 2012 we can now begin to analyse the trials and tribulations of how both Google and SEO have developed and changed. With Googles Penguin update keeping the industry on their toes earlier this year, the ethical approach has been to offer high quality content.
According to Cisco, by 2013 90% of all web traffic will include some video content. This important (and quite astounding) statistic highlights the real significance that SEO will hold in the next year as more and more business owners want their media and marketing content to go viral across the globe! Video SEO is just one creative method of gaining the online search exposure your business needs.
So What Is Video SEO?
Video SEO is more than simply creating a piece of video content for your client and hoping it goes viral – in fact it is a much more technical process.
As much as content discovery is important, the submission process has greater value. Title tags and metadata are important factors when optimising video and although these don’t necessarily impact upon rankings it gives the search engine the ability to understand what the content is about.
In the SEO industry we understand the importance visual content plays in both brand recognition, PR, and the relevance of thumbnails within the Google SERP rankings. With the constant development of Googles algorithm, top video searches are now being recognised as holding search engine value and can be found ranking highly. From an online search marketing perspective this is great as it offers quality viral content to be recognised from social signals.
Shared Content & Social Signals
High quality video content has brought into question how social signals improve ranking, how this will affect the future of SEO and also how you can re-adjust your long term and short term client strategy. Ultimately the goal of blending video SEO with social signals is to achieve greater web traffic, boost online marketing exposure and most importantly boost revenue.
Sharing and liking content on social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter, acts as a catalyst for Google to recognise that the content is socially beneficial, which then helps the video begin increasing in rank. When Google crawls a page it searches for page quality, relevance and keyword matches and video content adds value to these factors. With Facebook recently creating a paid promoted post offer, it will be interesting to see whether this will have any impact on Googles social signals algorithm.
Image coutesy of http://www.searchmetrics.com
What Are The Benefits?
There are a whole host of benefits from improving the social signal status of your client. By improving the online visibility this will in turn create the potential for more inbound links and in turn increase your business SERP ranking. Social media is certainly an area that should be considered by the client as this creates an opportunity for interaction, large amounts of web traffic and greater website authority. Another benefit of video SEO is that this type of content is embeddable; therefore, the content is able to be multiplied and spread across the web without Google hindering its ranking unlike other forms of link building.
Conclusion
With Matt Cutts from Google confirming that social signals do play a part in organic SEO there is certainly no doubt that sharing content online can be considered a new currency to successful link building.
Although we dont know exactly how the social signals affect rankings we can safely say that there is a significant correlation between the two. From the findings it can be seen that video SEO provides a useful tool to maximising a clients online presence. It may be naïve to say that optimising video content is the future of SEO, however it provides an alternative strategy towards creative link building which Google is now beginning to take on board.
Insights
