Own a video or media rich website? It’s a fact of life that search engines truggle to understand the content of video on websites. This post will help you overcome some of those problems and may even come in useful for less media rich websites, too.
Image credit: BobaliciousLondon
Transcribe your video content
There’s a ton of potentially valuable, unique content locked away inside those video files. Use transcription service, using a “human” reviewer to iron out any typos / kinks in the wording. Alternatively, outsource your transcription via services like Elance, ODesk or send the audio to companies like Speechpad.com. If your video content is in a specialist, niche topic area, it might pay to locate a freelancer who has some expertise in your subject.
Mark Up User Ratings and Reviews with Microformats
Seemingly few, if any video sites are fully embracing the magic of structured data on their sites. If you’re taking the time to invite users to rate your content, you should definitely play it back on your pages with a sensible markup. If RDFa is your thing, Yahoo Search Monkey (Video) has a [review:rating] attribute or you could experiment by nesting the rating attributes from RDFa. I prefer the simplicity of Microformats, and where appropriate some experimentation with hReview could yield improvement. Video rating [<video:rating>] is an optional attribute in video sitemaps too, so don’t forget to push your review data into your XML sitemap if you can.
Use simple embed funtionality
I’m particularly keen on making any embed process as slick and easy for users as possible. If this involves reworking your embed code and ensuring solid cross platform compatibility, then so be it. I love Vimeo’s example – it’s simple and clean. If you need to customise the display options a little further no problem.
It’s also worth pointing out that webmasters who produce video are looking for easy ways to earn links back to their site. If one of your visitors choose to embed your content, you’d like to earn a link back to your site, too. Most video hosting sites embed code will always ensure a link back to their own sites, not nessecarily that of the contributor. SEOmoz demonstrate a work around solution to this problem in their Whiteboard Friday posts, by adding their own link back in the embed code with the anchor SEO Software, and Paddy Moogan of Distilled talks about leveraging Youtube’s embed code for links in this post.
Use technology, differently
What happens when hardcore web developers and creatives get together to create something ground breaking?. There’s no doubt that doing something new or different with technology in the right space will attract serious buzz from social, the technology press and the developer community. Often confused with HTML5, the awesome flash hack NinjaUnboxing2 (hosted on Youtube) attracted 934 links (Root Domains, OSE).
934 links to a single campaign URL? That’s proper linkbuilding.
Social Activity On the Video Host Page
What are people saying about your video content? Sure, you’ve got the ability to capture comments, but what are people saying about that video on Twitter? Did the URL get submitted to other video aggregation / news sites? What are people saying in the comments on those sites? Scrape, fetch, display for a long tail traffic boost and solid social proofing of your content.
Make mash-ups easy: make your content available through an API
Great API documentation leads to great use cases of your API. Mash ups are awesome. Scraping is, cool. Let people use your content, openly through Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike licensing. The outcome can be pretty amazing, with all-important attribution, of course. For an example of “awesome” check out my new “is this the future of search?!” favourite-site-of-the-week, the amazing Qwiki:
I will point out that Qwiki’s embed code doesn’t have a link back to the source, for now…
Amp up your social connection / login capability
Not solely an “improve your SEO” point, but also an “improve your sign up and registration rate” point. Why have your own registration process when you can use sign in using Facebook, Twitter, OpenID, LinkedIn or Google? Tom uses this approach via Janrain on his excellent 7books – and remember that once you’re OAuth’d, the activity of your users can be shared, liked and tweeted in their social spheres with their permission. More social activity centred around a web page is arguably a great thing for your SEO efforts.
7 Ways Video & Rich Media Sites Can Improve Their SEO is one of our latest posts from: SEOgadget.co.uk.
10 [Non SEO] Websites That Are Pure Awesome
Image: Andersedin
Don’t get me wrong, I love a good SEO blog. The thing is, you can glean so much inspiration by stepping away from your SEO folder in Google Reader and checking out the wider web technology and development community. I’ve been on a low SEO, high technology diet for the past few weeks and I’ve loved reading these blogs. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but it’s worth checking out these resources:
High Performance Web Sites blog
URL: http://www.stevesouders.com/blog/
RSS: http://www.stevesouders.com/blog/feed/
Twitter: http://twitter.com/souders
Steve Souders was the man behind the Y!Slow project (of which there have been 1.7 million downloads!). Now a Googler, Steve’s heavily involved in the making the web faster initiative. Steve’s site has significantly improved my understanding of how web browsers work, and why websites can be slow. Recommended.
Catch him presenting at Google I/O here:
Line25
URL: http://line25.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/line25blog
RSS: http://feeds2.feedburner.com/Line25
Chris Spooner writes an excellent web design and development blog. More CSS and jQuery based stuff with some good instructional articles on issues like PhotoShop to XHTML layouts. Check out the tutorials section, Line25 Sites of the Week and this amusing take on SEO.
Web Appers
URL: http://www.webappers.com
RSS: http://feeds2.feedburner.com/Webappers
Twitter: http://twitter.com/webappers
Open source resources for web developers. If it’s open source, it’ll be on Ray Cheung’s site. Just today I read this article on handling 404 (linked to) pages with the JQuery plugin, and thought, “nice”.
Yahoo! Developer Network Blog
URL: http://developer.yahoo.net/blog/
RSS: http://feeds.developer.yahoo.net/YDNBlog
Twitter: http://twitter.com/ydn
Whatever Yahoo might be up to in organic search, the developer network resources show no sign of disappearing anytime soon. Thank god for that! YQL is awesome, Christian Heilman is awesome and, if you don’t want to take my word for it, read this post on Analyzing World Cup Data with YQL
ReadWriteWeb
URL: http://www.readwriteweb.com/
RSS: http://www.readwriteweb.com/rss.xml
Twitter: http://twitter.com/rww
Every time I log in to Google Reader, seems I’ve missed about 100 new articles from this site. Pitching themselves as “one of the most popular technology blogs in the world, known for offering insightful analysis about each day’s Internet industry news”, I’ve become aware of so many new technologies here (PubSubHubbub, for example), it really is a joy to read.
A List Apart
URL: http://www.alistapart.com
RSS: http://www.alistapart.com/site/rss
A ton of expert articles on web design and front end build, this is the site that first taught me about HTML5. The site covers a range of cool topics from (obviously) the technologies involved in web development, but also processes in web production, culture and user science.
Smashing Magazine
URL: http://www.smashingmagazine.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/smashingmag
RSS: http://rss1.smashingmagazine.com/feed/
Smashing Media owned Smashing Magazine is a corker of a resource for web designers and front end developers alike. A great resource for inspiration and a place to keep abreast of the latest web design technologies (HTML5, CSS3 etc). It’s a particular favourite of mine thanks to the freebies, resource lists and seemingly infinite jQuery resources.
And a few others
Honourable mentions go to favourites Ars Technica, Mashable! and Geeks Are Sexy. All awesome stuff, and I hope you enjoy my list – if you’d like to make any suggestions, I’d love to hear them…
10 [Non SEO] Websites That Are Pure Awesome is one of our latest posts from: SEOgadget.co.uk, UK SEO consultants helping people and organisations succeed in search.