Is having a Video important for SEO or is it the time-on-site that's important?
-
Assuming it's a relevant video, is having a video on your landing page considered a good SEO tactic in and of itself? Meaning, when google crawls the page, will they say "good job, there's a video here."
Or is having a video on your landing page something that helps you improve on other ranking factors like increased time on site? So, it would not be the video itself google "likes" but rather the increased User Experience factors that went up.
(Crossing my fingers I explained this well enough)
Thanks for any input,
Ruben
-
Thanks Cyrus. I appreciate the the multi-faceted answer along with the links. I'll see what I can do with this.
- Ruben
-
There's a couple of things that can add concrete SEO benefit when adding video to your site:
**1. Video Schema: **This can tell search engines what the video is about and add a ton of relevant information. https://developers.google.com/webmasters/videosearch/schema
2. Video Sitemaps: You can additionally provide some of the schema information here. But at this this can help get your videos indexed https://developers.google.com/webmasters/videosearch/sitemaps
3. Transcriptions: You can see how we do this on Moz with our Whiteboard Friday series. Basically it combines the best of both Video and blog post formats.
So the benefit is 2-fold. When implemented properly, a video can add contextually relevant information for SEO purposes (although "simply adding a video" likely isn't enough. And secondly, the increased user engagement, if/when successful, can add an important boost.
Hope that answers your question. Best of luck with your SEO!
-
Thanks!
- Ruben
-
Hotly debated. Same with image.. does having images on a website improve its rankings?
The answer is yes and no. I wouldn't say there is a DIRECT correlation (i.e. simply having a or <video> object on your page won't increase rankings). However, if you have properly optimized the image/video, then there is addition relevance and context that gets added to the page that would help with rankings.</video>
At an indirect level, visitor would be less likely to bounce back to serps, spend more time on site, have a better user experience and be more likely to link to the website.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
SEO for Videos and Infographics
Hi Mozers, When optimizing videos and infographics does it helps to put the word "video" or "infographic" in the browser title and H1? Any guidance is much appreciated! Yael
Image & Video Optimization | | yaelslater0 -
Negative SEO with Google Images
We have a client in the heavy equipment industry that is trying to "push down" images in a Google image search that are associated with an accident over ten years ago. This client has launched a new website, and we have applied the best practices of on-page SEO (page titles, unique meta-descriptions, alt-image tags, focused keyword targeting, etc.). The challenge we have is with Google Image results. It seems the image results shown in the Google Image search rankings are often not inline with how images have been labeled in the alt-tag section. I have checked these images with the Moz Chrome extension, and I have often found the way the image is labeled in the alt-tag is not related to the search query made within the Google image search bar. I certainly may not be factoring in other weighted items when it comes to how images are ranked. Are there other ranking factors associated with Google Image results outside of the Alt-Image Tag? If so, what are those factors? Our ultimate goal is to provide a strategy that would allow us to tag images within this specific sector that are relevant to this specific heavy equipment product, and at the same time, "push down" the rankings of the images that have a negative association to them. We certainly want to take the right approach here, and want to earn these rankings. However, the way Google ranks images seems to be a mystery of sorts. Is there a specific strategy relevant to Google Image rankings that would fall inline with the challenge listed above? I appreciate any advice on this topic. Thank you.
Image & Video Optimization | | JaredBroussard0 -
What's better for SEO an Optimized Image URL vs Optimized Image File Name?
I would like to know what is best practice for optimizing images for our website. Is it better to give an Image an optimized filename Or an optimized URL for SEO? Or is it better to do both? Would there be any harm in doing both if they are identical in their format? Any help would be greatly appreciated. With thanks, Kate
Image & Video Optimization | | K_borg0 -
Video SiteMap Updating
Hi all! We noticed some issues with our sitemap and so we went through and optimized it to re-submit it. At the same time, it seemed prudent to optimize our video sitemap, however we probably should have thought through that more as we are seeing the numbers of indexed videos going down. Why and what we changed: We recently moved from flash/flv video to Html5 videos with webm and mp4. So it seemed prudent to change our sitemap which was using the old flv videos. At the same time updating our videos with more SEO friendly titles seemed prudent. So far our indexed videos from the video sitemap have gone from 70,000 to 28,000, so: A. How much does a video sitemap depend on the URL of the web page versus the title and the video itself? I am assuming that Google sees a new file extension and title and assumes that it is a completely new video and that might be why they are de-indexing the old ones? I suppose we could go back and put the old sitemap to the old flv videos back up, but maybe we should just tough out the change and wait for the new videos to be indexed. Thanks!! Craig
Image & Video Optimization | | TheCraig0 -
What is the best youtube SEO strategy?
Ok- I have ten different you tube videos, i have done some article marketing, blog commenting, press releases, bookmarking, web 2.0. My videos are in highly competitive niches and i have some success with my videos for short time period. But it had been very difficult journey so far. Can someone give me the sound strategy for back links for youtube videos?
Image & Video Optimization | | Sajiali0 -
Finding Pages with Youtube Embedded Videos in Google SERP
I'm trying to figure out a process to find specific youtube embed videos using Google search. But a lot of sites are not being returned. For example, I know that the following video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1MnylRaQC3w) is linked to and embedded on http://gizmodo.com/5898438/watch-how-fender-builds-its-iconic-stratocasters However, I can't figure out a set of search terms to find that in Google. Searching for (1MnylRaQC3w Gizmodo) doesn't return the right page in the results. I'd like to figure this out so I could see everywhere a certain youtube video has been embedded.
Image & Video Optimization | | nixforsix0 -
Has anyone created a top (Insert # Here) list of local business listing sites?
Has anyone created a top (Insert # Here) list of local business listing sites we should manually submit to? I have around 20 or so but I was wondering if someone could give me a list to cross reference. I have quite a few local business that I work with and I want to make sure I'm hitting all of the main local listings. I also spend time searching for niche listing sites too for each client, so if you have any suggestions on easier ways to find these as well, I'm game. If you have created a list and its out in the wild somewhere I will be happy to link to it from my site. I'm always open to giving some LL to helpful people. Who's up for building a tool that will search through X number of local directories and report back to you if you are listed or not. (Not getlisted.org) You can select a checklist of sites that you want to check. (; Thanks Aaron
Image & Video Optimization | | Shipyard_Agency0 -
Using 1 main site for many branch office locations
I have 1 main site with many many city/state pages within the site. I would like to use this site as the 'website' on the google local places pages for all my branch office locations, however I am worried that if my domain authority isn't high enough for the site, google will think I am spamming 'google places'. Are there any best practices I can follow to do this? Ideally I would like my blended search to show www.site.com/boston not as www.site.com
Image & Video Optimization | | ilyaelbert0