The Future of Video Streaming SEO

Posted 1 year, 6 months ago at 3:55 pm. 0 comments

With the enormous amount of video content now available online, Google has stepped up to the challenge of developing a search engine that can actually index the audio content contained within video files. Although it has some way to go, GAudi represents a whole new era in terms of search engine optimisation for video.

Currently, Google is unable to index videos, instead it indexes the page on which it is placed and the content and meta-data within that page. User generated comments, the links pointing to the page, the title tags and other meta-data all converge to give the search engines an idea of what the video is about. But essentially Google is blind to what the actual video content is. This is particularly worrying for a search engine that aims to give relevant results to its users. Paradoxically, it seems Google actually gives preference to video content in its search engine results, often throwing up YouTube video result at the top of searches, leaving other content rich (and quite often more relevant) web pages much lower down the searches.

Bitmedia have approached the SEO to the launch of the Newsplayer.com website with search engine results and the indexing of video content as crucial. Following in the footsteps of the more successful video sites, Bitmedia implemented a page per video format for the launch of this media streaming website. Each news video segment has been individually optimised on a separate web page, with unique content and meta-data allowing Google to recognise the content contained within each video file and index it accordingly. This model gives rise to a large number of successfully indexed pages found in search results for relevant keyword searches driving large amounts of relevant traffic to the website through organic search.

Any new developments in video indexing such as GAudi will pose an interesting situation for video streaming SEO. If GAudi takes off, and is used to effectively index the audio content of video files for search engine results, then perhaps one future of video SEO will involve audio optimisation of some form. Given that most video content is either user generated or already in a finalised format before it arrives in a web developer’s inbox, then optimisation will need to be post production, or generated by a user at the point of upload. For instance, allowing a user to generate spoken introductions to videos could be one approach. Another would to be simply “tag” videos with spoken keywords or a voice over at various segments of the video content to allow Google to recognise the audio content as relevant to specific search terms. This could be achieved with a content management system that would add auto generated keyword voice introductions to pre-defined video segments according to the text keyword a user inputs. Obviously, any new audio content would need to integrate with the video content in a way that wouldn’t affect the user experience negatively. Perhaps one way around this would be to create a keyword rich title for each segment of the video that would appear on the screen and then be read out automatically, much like an opening credit for a TV programme.