Useful Google Video Series - Teach Parents Tech

Whether young or old, probably most of you reading this blog post have been asked by parents to explain some "technology" you find quite simple. After all, this is every day stuff for most of us.

Well, Google has provided the perfect way for you to get out of having to ever answer those pesky questions. Just tell them to visit "Teach Parents Tech" - a playlist in Google's YouTube channel featuring simple instructional videos on topics like "How to check the weather", "How to get movie times", and even "How to copy and paste". There are endless other options, all of them very fundamental - but probably things we do every day without even thinking. One of my favorites is "How to know if an email is real".

So, next time you get asked for "tech support" for some trivial thing, instead of rolling your eyes, send them to Google. You may want to consider checking it out yourself. Who knows - you might even learn something.

Video Crawability Best Practices

Posting quality videos to your website is only half the battle. They don't provide much value if search engines have trouble crawling and indexing them. When you post a new video, it is important to cover all the bases to ensure search engines can find it.

One of the most basic steps to ensure your videos can be indexed is to verify that the video urls are crawlable. Placing the url in your sitemap is not enough if that url is blocked by your robots.txt file. Robots.txt is a file in the root folder of a website that can be used to tell search engines to ignore certain urls. Before placing your video url in your sitemap, review your robots.txt file to ensure that the url of the playpage, the url of the content and player, and the url of the video thumbnail are not disallowed.

Some videos are only available in certain countries, locales, etc. Google introduced a new 'restriction' attribute video tag to let search engines where a video is eligible to be played. This tag can be used to either tell Google in what countries a video can be played or in what countries a video cannot be played. Videos that can be played anywhere do not require this tag.

Finally, if you remove a video from your website, it is important to let the search engines know that you have done so. Without alerting search engines that a video is removed, the search engine's index may not match the content of your website. Therefore, if someone clicks on a video result on a search engine, when they arrive on your site they will either be told that the video no longer exists or be served a different video. This can lead to a bad user experience. The best way to handle this situation is to return a helpful 404 page in place of the video page. From there, you may recommend related videos that may be of interest to the user.

Create a Video Sitemap

Having trouble getting your videos indexed by Google? There are a few ways to help Google both find and index the video files on your website. One almost surefire way to assist Google is to create a video sitemap. If implemented correctly, a video sitemap provides search engines with substantially more information than even a regular sitemap. Through use of a video sitemap, you can provide important information about your videos including the urls of the pages on which they reside, titles, keywords, thumbnails, and more.

Once you create a video sitemap, it is very easy to submit to Google. You simply submit it within your Google Webmaster Tools account the same way you submit a sitemap of your website. By submitting a video sitemap, you can substantially increase the likelihood of your videos showing up in Google's search results.

The Future of Video SEO

We all love when our videos show up in universal search. Those of us who are familiar with optimizing video for strategic keywords, know that we want to use those keyword phrases in the page title, meta tags, contextual copy surrounding the video, and title descriptions which is the text that is displayed in the actual video. As Google and other search engines become smarter, what does it mean for these video optimization principles?

Now that Google is able to transcribe soundtracks, the future of video optimization will rely heavily on the actual content of the video. When making a new video, the audio should mention the keyword phrases you are targeting, in addition to the page title, meta tags, etc. Think of it as a regular webpage of text. The keyword phrases you are targeting should be woven into the content of the page to give you the best chance of ranking for those keywords. With Google's ability to transcribe audio, think of the audio content of the video as the body copy of the page and include your targeted keywords accordingly.

If you are creating a video that does not have actual verbal content, like a video of a chicken wing eating contest, it is best to include a voice over that describes what is going on and uses strategic keywords.

New Video Ten Free Tools to Prepare Your Company for a Recession

We are producing a series of videos on how to recession proof your business. Here is tip #1 - how to generate free traffic to your website with search engine optimization