SEO Optimization for Video Content

You may be wondering how the heck do you optimize a video on a website?! I mean how the heck does the search engine know what I am saying in my video and I won't even show up on search if I'm not uploaded to youtube. You may think all this but its actually not true.

I became curious awhile back when I was looking up a review of a laptop and I got a video that popped up. Ordinarily this is noting unusal as google as been doing this for awhile. The part that caught my attention was the fact that this video was not youtube! This meant that somehow cnet was able to get their video to show up in my search results without posting the video on youtube. After some investigation this is what I was able to find:

There are special metatags just for videos, who would of tought?! These metatags are essential to having your video show up in the search results. To give you an idea of what kind of tags you can use here is a short list of them.

<meta name="title" content="Movie about my dog scout!>
<meta name="keywords" content="Dog, Scout, Milkbones"/>
<meta name="video_type" content="application/x_shockwave_flash"/>
<meta name="video_height" content="425"/>
<meta name="video_width" content="355"/>

In the body of your page you would use this markup to represent your video.

By indicating that ther eis a video on this page and its dimensions the google crawler will be able to pick up on this and show your video on the resuts page of a good search. If you want to see an example type in derrick site:collegehumor.com into your google search and you should get video that comes up from college humor that is not a part of youtube.

For some reason google also loves to put video at the top of search results so its an added bonus. The key to getting ranked high is to pick the best possible title for your video file, and to fill in your title, keywork, description, and video meta tags. After a couple months of waiting for the crawler to come back to your site you should have a video that shows up in a google search. Good luck!

By the way for those of you who don't know I have an upcoming book that will be released in april called ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Programming: Problem - Design - Solution. I've also got a great project currently on codeplex called TheBeerHouse that is a full featured website based off of the MVC Framework RC1. If your interested the link is as follows: Codeplex TheBeerHouse MVC Project