Day: September 3, 2014

Explainer videos are short and concise videos ideally 60-90 seconds that explain your product or service to the potential customers. They are being rapidly used by businesses in the form of animation to explain a problem and provide a solution to the problems. We want you to know that a good script defines the quality of your video. Do search engines understand good scripts? But search engines will not recognize good scripted videos until you incorporate good SEO tactics. And it is no fun when an explainer video with a good script is unable to generate traffic to your website. The whole idea behind creating an explainer video is to create brand awareness and increase conversion rate. Search engines give higher ranking to authentic and quality textual content. Videos are no different provided they are optimized for search engines. Search engine crawlers can only understand text associated with the video for indexing purpose. There is no room for ignorance as video SEO tactics is a must practice to increase visibility of your video on the web. No wonder that 70% of the top 100 search listings contain a video. Let me share with you 10 important tips for optimizing your explainer video. Apt title Your titles must look natural. A video title must include your most important keyword. Titles are the first visible piece of information in the search engine results. A good title has to be simple and catchy. YouTube provides a character limit of 100 for video titling. Adding trigger keywords attracts the attention of the viewer and you are most likely to have a higher click-through-rate. Trigger keywords are supporting words used with your keywords to form a title. Also, prefer to use the keyword in the beginning of the title. For instance, if you are making an explainer video to demonstrate how to operate the application ABC, then you can use the title as “Operating ABC application” or “Learn ABC application” instead of using “How to operate ABC application” Gripping description and thumbnail Video description is the longest textual content associated with the video used by search engines to index your information. Write quality and SEO-friendly content with relevant keywords. Your title and description should relate with each other. A good description contains the summary of the video with a link to your website. Place your link both in the beginning and at the end of the description to get a better chance of being viewed. Place an attractive thumbnail of your video to grab attention of the viewers. Thumbnail is a snapshot of your video that is visible on the result page. Right set of keywords Knowing the most popular set of keywords is important to get higher visibility for your explainer video. You must know what keyword phrases are used by your target audience to search for your product so that you can optimize your title and description accordingly. There are a number of free tools that allow you to do keyword research and note the response received to your website. Doing a check for keywords will tell you if you chose the right keyword. Type your selected keyword on Google and see if you get any video results on the top page. If you do, then you have chosen the right word. You must also remember not to stuff keywords in your content unnecessarily as it deteriorates the quality of your content and search engines mark it as spam. Tags Quite similar to keywords, tags are additional keywords that you pick up and place with your video assuming that many people use these tags to search for your product. In other words, tags are keywords with lesser significance. Unlike keywords, tags are not placed strategically in your video title and description. Your keywords should definitely be a part of your tag list but the opposite is not necessary. Tags also help the crawlers to define the category of your video. Create a video sitemap After all the hard work of creating an explainer video, you will certainly not like to miss the traffic. Video sitemap is necessary when you have multiple videos on your site but they are hosted by video-hosting websites like YouTube, Vimeo etc and you want the visitors to be directed to your site. Video sitemap includes detail like category, title, tags, description, published date, duration of your videos etc that guides the search engines to index your videos correctly. A searcher who finds your video will be directed to your site and not to YouTube after you create a video sitemap. Google Webmaster Tools help you to submit a video sitemap. Transcript your video Video transcription adds value to your content. Search engines index according to the content associated with your video. Finding your video will become easier for search engines when people type content in your transcript in the search bar. Moreover, transcription helps people with impaired hearing and who speak a different language to see what your video say. Transcript content can be easily translated via Google Translate to the language of the viewers’ choice. Video quality A low resolution video with poor clarity often puts off the viewers. Besides that, bad audio and blurred readability makes it hard for the viewers to understand your message. It also affects your brand image. The content of your video can be good enough but a standard video quality is a bare minimum requirement to get more number of hits. And you don’t really need a HD resolution for this. Post on your own website Your priority should be to host your video on your own website as it gives your website a prominence over video-hosting sites like YouTube.  Furthermore, it reflects your brand personality and promotes your brand. And the visitors land directly on your website which allows them to browse further information on your product instantly. On the contrary, you should also post your video on YouTube and Vimeo as it increases your visibility on the web.