Videos as Content on Your Website

We get up in the morning and read some blogs with our coffee, check the weather or the sports scores before heading to work, look up data we need for work projects, amuse ourselves on breaks with office humor —

And that link is where I found this little vignette, which is really not characteristic of PR people:

3PM Too Bad No Amount Of Concealer Will Cover Your Flame Trail
Copywriter, after noticing web designer refreshing makeup: Wow. Look at you. Got a hot date?

Web designer: No. I’m meeting people. And I’ve never met them in person before.

Snarky PR specialist: And you don’t want them to know right away that you’re a horrible person?

But I digress.

The point is, we go to the internet looking to be entertained or informed. We want good content.

As website owners, we also want good content on our websites. This is what brings both humans and search engines to our site, and makes the site pay its rent, as it were, for our businesses. When the website does its job, we can afford to keep it going and continue adding excellent content for our visitors.

More and more, we want to add video. Our human visitors enjoy it and are even coming to expect it. And yet, from the point of view of SEO, it can cause us problems. Search engines can’t see what our videos are doing. There are technological advances that may solve this problem soon, but for right now, what should we do?

Here are a few ideas.

Use text along with video. For our first example, look at Rabbi Fohrman’s website with the Hoffberger Institute.

Rabbi Fohrman’s lectures on video and audio are the main content on this website. But see how the text introducing the video encapsulates the main point of the lecture: “The Exodus… As Americans, we believe in the fundamental equality of man. As Jews, we are taught that we are a ‘Chosen People’. What does it really mean to be ‘chosen’? Is this idea compatible with our American heritage?” The text on the rest of the page includes the site’s main keywords.

Make multimedia an extra on the page. Sometimes the video is important and useful, but it doesn’t have to be the main course. In our second example, Clevertech’s page is optimized, and the video is an added feature.

It pops up when you want it, as you can see below, but doesn’t prevent the rest of the page from doing its job.

Differentiate. Joblingo’s video is important — training videos are one of the company’s main products — so we don’t want to be subtle about the video. It’s front and center.

However, that’s only from the point of view of the human visitors. If we look at the stuff the search engines see, the video is a small section in a large amount of targeted content. We can give the search engines a different experience from the humans, if you’ll forgive a little anthropomorphism.

We’re talking here about how the video behaves on the page, not the video itself. For more about that, visit “Using Video for SEO.”