Jan 14, 2009
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On the web today we are seeing more and more individuals create and publish videos on their websites. Right now the search engines are contiunally improving the way they index videos by scanning the words that are said in the video. When it comes to search engines looking at videos the most important thing to have is text around the video.
The same goes for images as well as it is imperative to have alternative text aka alt text with images so the crawlers can know what the image is of. The same philosophy is true for videos. If you make videos and want to post them on your site then make sure you have text that surrounds the video.
For example lets say I was to post a video here on this page about SEO. I would explain in text what the video is about. Again the best way to do this is to imagine that you have a blind person in the room and it is your job to explain what the video is about to them. This is the same way I do alt text for images.
When you are explaining the video in text you will want to use your keywords and words that best describe your video and what is in the video. Be careful not to overstuff your keywords here and make it sound as normal as possible. Keyword stuffing is always bad in any copy and the same goes for the text that you put around videos.
I have seen a lot of blogs adding videos on a constant basis without any text around it. While the saying ” A picture is worth a thousand words” is true the search engines still love to see and eat text like candy. The search engine crawlers feel like a kid in a candy store when there is a lot of good quality content on a relevant subject even though pictures and videos are becoming more popular.
The text that is wrapped around a video will be what the search engines determine to be of most importance to try and figure out what the video is about. It is the same philosophy as hyperlinks. Hyperlinks that are in the middle of an article or text normally fair better than those that are by themselves. This is why when you are building inbound links it is always a goal to get good anchor text links on other sites that are in an article instead of just some link on the side or in the footer because the crawler is also reading the surrounding text to help it determine the context.
Adding videos to websites is a must in today’s online world because that is what people like to see and hear. People will stay on your website if you give them a reason to stay on your website and video is one of those things that will help people stay on the site. As you do this you must also remember to give the search engine what it wants which is text. Text has been around for a lot longer and the search engines are masters at reading text and still in the learning and adapting phase of reading video.