Optimising the content of your web site is a key component of your search engine optimisation (SEO) strategy and one you’re hopefully staying on top of to maintain your ranking in the search engines. But, what about your video content? Are you making sure to optimise that? You may be thinking, “But it’s video? Why would I optimise for that?”.

Yes, it is video, but it’s more than that – it’s also content, so should be treated with just as much attention to optimisation as your textual content. Especially nowadays, with the proliferation of video not only on individual web sites, but also on social media sites, and, even more importantly, in search engine results.

YouTube’s Keyword Tool

When performing keyword research for your content, you would normally take advantage of the many keyword tools currently available online, both free and paid. But, did you know YouTube has its own version of a keyword tool? Well, it does, and it’s pretty simple to use. All you need to do is type the keyword or phrase you want to search for into the box provided and click on “Get keyword ideas”.

The tool will return a list of keywords relevant to your search along with their monthly search volume. Of course, the results are all based on YouTube data, and, as such, will differ from the ones you’d get from a regular keyword search tool, such as Wordtracker. The reason is that people use different terms to search for video content than they do for textual content, since the content is so different. You might want to note that, similar to Google’s External Keyword Tool, you have the option to search by broad match, phrase match, exact match and negative match.

You’ll want to narrow the list returned by selecting the keywords that are most appropriate for the video you’re uploading, and then use the abbreviated version of the list to optimise the new video by using the keywords in the video title, tags and descriptions.

Checking On Your Competition

With thousands, nay, millions, of videos uploaded onto YouTube, it’s more than likely you’ll find videos posted by some of your competitors. Want to find out what makes their videos so successful? No problem. Find a competitor’s video that has a high number of views, copy the URL and paste it into the search box. The tool will return a list of keywords and phrases used to optimise the video.

You, in turn, can basically copy your competition’s campaign, with a few tweaks here and there, if needed, specific to your video, to optimise your video and help improve your search engine results.

Another nice option is the ability to perform keyword targeting by demographics, similar to the methods available to target specific audiences in such things as MySpace advertising. You can specify gender, age range, location and make your focus even more narrow by specifying the interests of the audience you want to target.

Before you upload another video to your internet business web site, bear in mind that videos are content just like the written articles on your site and should be optimised for the search engines in just the same way. Now that videos are returned as part of the results in search engines, if it’s not already, optimising videos should become part of your search engine optimisation (SEO) strategy moving forward.

For all aspects of search engine optimisation (SEO), including optimising your videos, contact a UK internet business coach, who can develop a complete search engine optimisation (SEO) strategy to get your business’s web site ranked successfully in the search engines.

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