How Google And YouTube Can Improve Your SEO

Writing by Nick Stamoulis

One recent bit of news from Google is that they are phasing out Google Video. Surprised? I’m not. Why else would the search engine have purchased YouTube?

There is no doubt, online video will affect the future of the Web. You don’t need a crystal ball to see that. And both Google and YouTube will play a part in that. Besides the obvious links from YouTube to your website for videos that you upload, there are other ways that you can use video to better your site’s long term search engine optimization efforts. Even if you don’t upload videos yourself.

The first way to improve your search engine optimization through video is to include a video sitemap that is separate from the HTML and SML sitemaps for your website. You should have a separate landing page for each video on your website and make sure that the search engines can crawl your site and find those videos.

Also make sure that each video has an adequate title and description. That is, each video’s landing page. Start thinking of individual videos and landing pages as one and the same. This will be very important to the formative years of video optimization.

But what if you don’t upload videos yourself? What if you just want to republish videos that you find on YouTube? We’ve recently discovered that those videos that you republish on your site can be found through the search engines. If you do the above well and optimize your video landing pages properly then it’s quite possible that YouTube videos you publish on your site could be found in the search engines before they are found on YouTube, the original source. You could land traffic through these videos that you weren’t counting on.

All the ways of improve video optimization have not come to light yet. This is a part of SEO that is still in its infancy and we are sure to see many changes before video optimization matures to the point that traditional SEO has reached. Still, there are many reasons to believe that YouTube videos will improve your site’s performance and user experience.

source : http://www.searchengineoptimizationjournal.com