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Why does Video SEO work?

Aug 3 2011

One of the questions that comes up often is "Why does video seo actually work?"

Ben, our Video SEO expert, breaks down why search engines rank videos differently and what you can do to benefit most from Video SEO.

Visit our Video SEO page to learn how Wistia can help you dramatically improve your rankings.

Chris (89 Posts)

Co-founder and CEO of @wistia. My obsessions include: marketing, analytics, IPAs, coffee, evolutionary health, and ping pong. Say hello!


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This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 3rd, 2011 at 10:00 am and is filed under Managing Video. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

  • http://www.shearerpainting.com john shearer

    Great Video Ben!!! I agree 100%.

  • http://twitter.com/smichaelgriffin Michael

    I def agree with your basic premise (video SEO = good) and the stats / examples are great. Where can I find more how-to info? Presumably video SEO is different than SEO for text-based content; how do the tools and tactics differ?

  • Ben@Wistia

    Michael, great question.

    The best way to influence your video SEO is by using video sitemaps. Video sitemaps are similar to normal sitemaps in that they are a way to inform search engines about your video content so that the search engines can find and index the videos. These sitemaps contain both information about the content (title, description, tags, etc.) as well as more technical based info such as the asset locations (video/thumbnail/player), durations, publication dates, etc..

    Here is a link to an article from Google’s help on video sitemaps that is one of the best resources: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=80472

    As you may have guessed, Wistia does provide tools to make this process simple. Our video SEO tools help you create, host, and manage your video sitemaps and embody many best practices that we have learned through research, experience, and being a part of the community. You can see how our video SEO tools work by taking a look at our documentation here: http://wistia.com/doc/video-seo

    Please let me know if you have any followup questions on this or anything else.

  • http://www.ybc.tv james

    Hi Ben

    We’d be interested to carry content like this on http://www.ybc.tv

    More SEO as we are a YT partner ;-)

    Let me know.

    James

  • http://www.tomnash.eu Tom

    Nice video but it would have been nice to see a brief explanation of how Wistia can help / call to action / further reading sources?

    Big fan of video SEO – just thought its a missed opportunity, especially when considering the production quality :)

  • http://www.pragmaticlearning.in PragmaticLearning

    Hi Ben,

    Thanks for sharing. Could you please share if this particular video was developed using Camtasia?

    Thank You

    - Raj

  • http://www.pacificpaintservices.com The Contractor

    We have been looking at getting into making videos for our business to help it stand out better for SEO. I’d have to agree with Tom that they missed a great opportunity to help small business grow.

  • Davidwebb

    Great tips given, though there are some which I have heard for the first time but thanks for sharing the knowledge.

  • http://www.dnavertical.com/ DNA Vertical, Inc.

    Thanks, Ben. The more info you can provide about Video SEO the better. There’s not enough credible data out there and it’s a compelling feature of the Wistia offering.

  • http://www.facebook.com/billy.mccannon Billy McCannon

    Is there a way get a wistia sitemap onto a Word Press site? I’ve been looking but have found nothing that works. All I can find is Yoast which is a lot to pay to upload a file. Yoast video sounds great down the line but now I just want to upload the sitemap.

  • Alyce

    Hi Billy! We aren’t WordPress experts, but using a Robots.txt plugin (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-robots-txt/) or the Yoast plugin are the best solutions. Hope that helps!