How to Improve Your Search Results (Embed Video)

Now, I'm primarily a writer and a reader, and not really much of a consumer of video news. Frankly, when I'm scanning sites for headlines about the media industry, I skip most video reports, because by and large they interrupt the dialogue already occurring inside my head, and therefore force me to pay attention to somebody else's voice.

Yuck.

But then I started thinking, "Maybe that is the point, stupid!" Videos are distracting and demand attention. So, thinking about this from an industry perspective, I did a bit of research. One thing we all care about in online media is how our sites fare in organic search.

Take Google. You can't do much better than turn up on the top page of Google search results, right? Well, could embedding a video help you achieve that goal? Turns out it does, especially if it is a YouTube video. (No surprise there.)

Forrester Research conducted a little experiment earlier this year that produced the following results:

"(O)ptimizing video content to take advantage of blended search is by far the easiest way to get a first-page organic ranking on Google." (Blended search is the practice by search engines of combining videos, images, news stories, maps,and other types of content on their results pages.)
Google presents a lot of blended search results. "(N)early three-quarters of the searches we ran on Google in the UK, and well over half the searches we ran on Google in the US, returned blended results."
"(V)ideos stand a much better chance than your text pages of being shown on the first results page."Forrester computed the odds of a text page appearing on the first page of Google as 500,000 to one, whereas the odds of a video from YouTube making it were a much better 11,000 to one. (That's about 50 times better, and much more attractive than what you'll get by buying a lottery ticket, BTW.)

To take advantage of these odds, there are a few simple steps Forrester recommends:

Insert keywords into video file names.
Host your videos on YouTube.
Write keywords into the video's title, description and tags.
Embed the videos into your text pages.
Help Google locate your videos by creating a video library on your site.

Forrester offers much more on SEO for blended search here.

So, what is that little video up top of this post all about? Just an amusing guide to Twitter that appeared on YouTube last year. It doesn't illustrate what I've written about here at all, because like I said, I'm not into video content. So, I'm just linking to it to drive a worthy content creator a little marginal traffic, hopefully. Call it a random act of link-kindness.

David Weir

David Weir is a veteran journalist who has worked at Rolling Stone, California, Mother Jones, Business 2.0, SunDance, the Stanford Social Innovation Review, MyWire, 7x7, and the Center for Investigative Reporting, which he cofounded in 1977. He’s also been a content executive at KQED, Wired Digital, Salon.com, and Excite@Home. David has published hundreds of articles and three books,including "Raising Hell: How the Center for Investigative Reporting Gets Its Story," and has been teaching journalism for more than 20 years at U.C. Berkeley, San Francisco State University, and Stanford.

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