5 Search Engine Optimization Tips for Videos That Go Viral

By now, we all know the Internet marketing mantra that “Content is King” and we also know that visually engaging content reigns as the attention-grabbing younger sibling, especially since YouTube is the world’s second largest search engine. Creating visually engaging content that goes viral is basically a marketer’s dream.

Gotye's music video went viral with countless parodies

Since we can’t always count on that winning combination of wit, entertainment, creativity and, yes, a little bit of luck, to make every video a viral sensation, marketers must rely on other techniques to spread the word. Of course, having a video strategy as part of your social media plan is important for the foundation of your campaign, but let’s focus on the video itself for the purpose of this discussion.

Once you create a video, how do you get eyeballs on it? The answer is search engine optimization:

1. Choose your (key)words carefully – only pick your top one or two keywords that make the most sense within the context of the video. Include your company name and “dot com” in the keyword box.
2. Give it a title – make sure the title lets YouTube as well as your intended audience know exactly what the video is about. You definitely want to include your chosen keyword in the title and even the word “video” because people searching outside of YouTube tend to use that term as part of their search.
3. Add a description – again, you want to include your keyword(s) in the description and a hyperlink to your website or landing page with a call to action.
4. Transcribe your video – adding a transcript of the video for captioning helps YouTube determine the video’s keyword relevancy and allows Google to index the text. This is why “carefully” was included with “choose your keywords” in number 1.
5. Syndication – although YouTube is the most popular consumer video channel right now, other video services like Vimeo and MetaCafe can play an important role in helping your video get found. You don’t have to re-create your titles & descriptions, but you do have to change up your wording to avoid duplicate content. Plus, you can do other things while your videos are loading, so it doesn’t take that much time.

Once your videos are properly optimized for SEO, you should put your social media plan into action. Your video must still be promoted and the link should be posted on your website and all of your social media channels, but now it has a greater chance of being found by people who are not necessarily in your network. And that can’t hurt.

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.

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.