Search engine optimization is such a vast concept that many forget to focus on a variety of tasks. Whether you are concentrating on content concerns, link building, marketing efforts or on-page considerations, you may find yourself overwhelmed by the amount of planning it takes to be successful. With respect to content, most brands keep an eye on SEO for their pages and blog posts, but do not venture outside of these standard elements when improving search rankings. In order to provide you with more potential success, we will be discussing today how to maximize the impact that your video content has on search engines, which can help improve visibility and rankings.

Host It Yourself

The more content you host on your domain, the better your domain will perform in SEO. When pinging for SEO, videos are no different. While websites such as YouTube and Facebook can provide their own natural SEO benefits in the form of better ranking videos, those that are hosted on your own domain will directly improve how your pages rank in search. Not only will this help boost all of your pages over time, but your individual videos can be optimized to better rank in search as well. This doesn’t mean that you can’t host videos on YouTube or social media, but it’s generally a good idea to host and optimize them directly on your site as well.

Involve the Audience

There are plenty of ways to improve the number of views, shares and comments that a video earns. Some of those methods also help increase SEO clout. One way that you can help augment the SEO power of each video is to provide a bit of interactivity. Those who use YouTube on a regular basis often find that annotations and captions can be a great way to get people involved, keep them on their channels watching videos, and redirect them to their websites. There are a number of additional ways to make videos interactive, such as creating storylines in the form of segmented videos that can be navigated through like a plot by users’ choices. Efforts such as these can tie your videos together; a rising SEO tide tends to lift all boats.

Always Use Keywords

Whether you are hosting the videos on your website or uploading them to YouTube and social media, you absolutely need to include keywords in your metadata and descriptions. These keywords work for your videos just how they would work for any other element of your website. Search engines generally cannot read video content, but they learn how to display videos in search based on the keywords associated with them. Keyword research is something you’re likely already doing, so make it apply when pinging for SEO in videos and see what kind of results it delivers for you.

What is your biggest challenge in producing videos? Is it harder to make the video or make the video successful? Which part do you enjoy the most? Let us know below in the comments and share your experiences with others!