Monthly Archives: July 2010
This is just a quick note to let our readers and customers know that CIK Marketing will be closing down early today in order to start our Civic Holiday weekend a little bit early.
We’ll be back in the office all the more early on Tuesday, August the 3rd. If you have a question or comment in the meantime, don’t hesitate to drop us a quick line over on the Contact Page.
Have a great, safe, holiday weekend!
The average person spends 15 minutes a day watching videos on YouTube. The site exceeds more than 2 billion views a day. There’s no denying that video is a powerful online tool, so why then are so many small businesses avoiding it like the plague? Adding video to your Chatham-Kent small business website design can dramatically improve not just the look of your site, but also how you rank in search engine results.
Why Video Works
As informative and effective as text can be, it doesn’t have the same visual “wow” factor as video. Just ask your average 12 year old what’s more entertaining, reading a book or watching a television show. Video grabs your attention and keeps you engaged. What’s more, video is easy to digest. Believe it or not, you can cram an awful lot of information into a very short video – far more than I’d ever be able to write in this blog post! From instructional videos to hilarious comedy spots, video can help you education, entertain, and enlighten your online visitors.
Search Engines and Videos
The important thing to remember when loading a video to your website is the fact that search engines can’t technically “watch” what is happening on the screen. This means that a search engine like Google can’t automatically and independently determine what your video is about… yet. Google is doing everything they can to integrate voice recognition and image recognition into their ranking algorithms, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Right now, search engines need help understanding the content of a video. Luckily, there are some proven techniques available.
How to SEO Videos
If you’re hoping to load videos to your website you’re going to first need to find a hosting solution. Hosting videoes can be cumbersome work. The fastest solution? Create a YouTube channel and stream all of your video via their platform. It will make the whole process easier, including the task of SEO. When you load a video to YouTube, remember to play close attention to:
1) The video’s title
More than 24 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute – now that’s a lot of video to try and pick through in order to find just one: yours. Make things easier for search engines (and for viewers) by giving your video a descriptive title that includes important keywords. Not sure what keywords to include? YouTube offers a keyword suggestion tool that helps make this process easier. You should also include these keywords in the video’s description as well as in the video tags.
2) Closed captioning options
YouTube’s caption feature allows you to provide viewers and search engines with a deeper understanding of your video. To add closed captioning to your next YouTube video, select the “Captions and Subtitles” menu on the editing page. This will allow you to include a full (search engine-friendly!) transcript of your video. YouTube offers closed captioning in over 120 languages, which is great for companies that market to foreign consumers.
3) Content
It doesn’t matter whether you’re writing content or filming it – it has to be unique, relevant, and useful in order for a human viewer or search engine to see it as beneficial. Focus on presenting your ideas in an original manner and people will be sure to appreciate it.
