If you’re creating whiteboard videos for public consumption, properly optimizing your videos for discovery and prioritization by the search engines using SEO best practices is an absolute must!
To understand why this is so important, we first need to look at how the search engines operate. Every search engine – including Google, Bing, Yahoo and a host of second-tier companies – maintains an “index” of all the web pages its automated programs have discovered on the internet. Then, when users enter search queries into their browser windows, these engines must parse through their indexes to determine which results to show, using algorithms that weight more than 200 factors when choosing the best possible results.
If your whiteboard video is selected as one of these top results, it will be listed on the first page of the search engine’s natural results area (as opposed to the sponsored results area). Achieving one of these top rankings is especially important when it comes to building traffic to your website via SEO, as few search users take the time to navigate past the first page of results.
With this in mind, if you plan to use your whiteboard videos to build free traffic to your website, you’ll want to adhere to the following guidelines in order to optimize your content correctly for SEO:
Step #1 – Know your keywords
Search results pages are created in response to the queries – also known as keywords or keyword phrases – that search users enter into the engines. As a result, getting your video included in these listings means that you need to be aware of the particular search phrases your customers are entering into the search engines, as well as which keyword combinations you’d like your video to appear in the search results for.
Good keyword research involves understanding two key components – search volume and competition. Ideally, you want enough people searching for your chosen keywords, as it doesn’t make sense to try to rank for phrases that receive no search volume. At the same time, targeting highly competitive keyword phrases (for example, “auto insurance,” “lose weight” or “make money online”) may be so difficult to break into given their existing competition levels that they aren’t worth pursuing.
Plenty of other resources exist online detailing how to choose the right keywords for your SEO campaign, but for now, it’s enough to know that you’ll want to have these target phrases identified before you begin the video creation process.
Step #2 – Add your keywords to target video promotion areas
Once your video is created, you’ll want to incorporate your target keywords into your videos in different ways. As an example, if you choose to upload your video to YouTube, you can include your keyword phrases in your file name, your video title, your video description and your video tags.
Doing so will help the search engines to understand what your video is about, though you should be careful not to over-optimize. Making each of the elements listed above appear natural (while still incorporating your keywords into these valuable places) will help to prevent the search engines from labeling you a spammer.
Step #3 – Use your keywords in your video’s content
Finally, if you plan on uploading your video to Youtube, be aware that this service automatically creates a text-based version of your video’s audio content for use in its accessibility services. Because these text files are also stored in the Google index, including your target keywords in the content of your video can give you an extra opportunity to inform the search engines as to what your content is about.