WallyDay.com - Welcome to my sandbox. Play nice.

We all have seen the research that has been pouring out all over the internet with regard to the growing popularity of online video content. Internet users are consuming online video content at a rate greater than previously predicted. And, consumers all over are learning to produce and share online video content. Video can often be a more effective means for a producer to get a message across than typical offline or online content. In order to take advantage of the opportunity that exists today with regard to online video, one must learn the tips and techniques that can be used to allow for greater discoverability of online content - this is called Video SEO or video search engine optimization.

1) It is recommended that you create and submit a transcript for users and the search engines, add a transcript to each video file you’ve uploaded via your Video Status page. Create a Keyword Rich Title for your Transcript; include a brief introductory paragraph/synopsis that describes the subject matter of your transcript (and video) and be sure to publish your transcript.

2) Keep in mind that when users search for videos on search engines, often time they use the word “video” in their search. For example, “car racing video.” Therefore, in addition to the keywords that you are targeting, also be sure to include the word “video” or “videos” in your description, text, title, meta data, etc…

3) Off-page SEO, or, the techniques that one uses outside of the actual coding of the site itself (links, etc…), is just as effective for online video content as it is with any other webpage. Therefore, do your best to develop inbound links to your videos with the keywords that you are targeting in the anchor text of those links.

4) It is advisable to create a separate sitemap just for your videos in your site and try to keep your video files in one directory this would help the web crawlers to locate your video files speedily and effortlessly.

5) It is very difficult for the web crawlers of any search engine to crawl into the video contents inside flash players so they usually prefer to stay away from such files. It is therefore advisable not to use such kind of file formats which discourages the web crawlers.

6) Keep a keyword friendly URL structure that uses a few of your main keywords in the url string. For example - website.com/videos/car-racing-video/ is much better than website.com/videos/?videoID=123kjh

7) More than anything, I have learned that the thumbnail that you choose for your video is one of the most important factors in terms of the number of people that choose to view your video. With that in mind, try to experiment with various thumbnails until you have a good idea which images attract the most views from the audience that you are targeting.

When hosting videos on your own site, keep your videos one per page and put all the pages with videos into one directory. This combined with a video sitemap will help search engines find and index all of your important videos.

Besides the tips mentioned above for Video SEO, there are a few other guidelines to keep in mind:

9) With any SEO that you do online, choose keywords that you know users are searching for. Use keyword research tools to discover keywords and phrases that are most often searched for when looking for the information that you are creating.

10) Viewers who offer feedback are most likely to take the desired action on your video. This could be a good opportunity for you to submit fresh content, if the most popular videos were included months ago, it really helps.