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There is no surprise why video has become so popularly used on websites, blogs, and social sharing. This has a lot to do with the fact the they are visually pleasing, and naturally gain traffic. What most people overlook, however, is that videos have a lot of potential to raise your sites rankings and SEO. Creating a viral video can greatly increase your web presence, and also serve as a humungous backlink if it gets shared. What is important, though, is that you have the video properly optimized. This means that you know how to use keywords within the video files, how to properly embed the video, and how to do basic keyword research that is cheap and easy. If you do all of these things correctly, you can have great results.

Keyword Research

A lot has been done with keyword research, and an entire industry has been built around it. For video SEO, investing in keyword research isn’t exactly necessary. With autofill features on Youtube, you can search for a term that you might want to rank for, and then see the suggested searches. These suggestions are there because that is what people are searching for. When it comes down to it, your target keywords should be what people are actually looking for, not what you want people the associate your brand with. By using these terms, your video is more likely to be found, because it’s more likely that you have the terms embedded that people are looking for.

Apply Keyword Metadata

With articles and other materials, using targeted keywords after your keyword research is vital. With a blog post, for instance, you would use those keywords, and often link back using those keywords. The is the same for video, but instead, you use it in the file name and then description. You can use different key phrases in each, but you’ll want to limit yourself to two keywords, because just like anything else, overly optimized posts and keywords will get you flagged and noted, possibly penalized. If you use the popularly used phrase as the title of the file, and in the description (or use a new keyword) and you’ll have a good chance of someone coming across your video because you have used the right phrases as searched on Youtube.

Get Your Links!

What is most important about using video is that Google sees videos as dynamic media, and gives it more relevance. So when you use your video, and have your link embedded in the file, if others watch and share the video you get huge backlink benefits. So if you host your video on your own website and it is shared directly from your website, then your link is already in the file info, and with every share you get full link juice. If you do not have video hosting abilities, make sure that you create a custom embed that includes your link, so even if it’s shared on Vimeo or Youtube, you still get your link in the file, it just happens to be shared with the hosting site’s domain. Again, with the benefit video gives you, sharing the link juice still will provide great benefits.

These are the basics of how to optimize your online video for SEO benefits. Of course there is a lot more that goes into making a viral video, like coming up with the idea and producing it well, but no matter how good it is, if it’s not optimized, you’ll get a lot of views, but not a lot of SEO. It takes a lot of effort to pull of a good video, but getting your video optimized is easy, as long as you pay attention to what you’re doing. So if you’re really looking to make a mark with your social and SEO campaigns, look into utilizing video in your efforts. Luckily with new, cheaper technology, it has become even more feasible to do.

Peter Margolis is a SEO and social media blogger that focuses on the importance of good content creation. He writes for Aspire Direct, and is a freelance video producer and photographer.

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