Jump Start Search Engine Page Ranking By Optimizing Video

As an online retailer you may focus most of your attention on pay per click and organic search engine listings.

You may think that video is only for the big guys who can afford the production costs. You may also think that video loads more slowly so it is a lesser alternative, compared with other strategies.

If you honestly believe that only the big guys can produce video, you must have never taken a look at YouTube where practically every member of the planet has produced a video.

In reality, with some decent lighting, a microphone and a free or inexpensive editing program, you can produce video at an acceptable quality for use on your site. And, even if your product is less inviting than the millions of get rich today products that are excerpted into online video snippets, you can certainly produce video showing your product in use, showing how to assemble it, alternative uses, its use along with accessories that you sell and so on.

Finally, access to broadband is growing so the slow video: is diminishing.

Why should you do this? Because your video is fifty times more likely to get first page ranking on the major search engines than any of your web pages. And that is a huge advantage.

The Forester Blog for Interactive Marketing Professionals recently conducted a study of the major search engines and found that Google in particular blended its search engine results to include visual media (though none really uses images in its search engines at all).

So how do you get your video noticed? First of all, you need to treat them like any other content and optimize the descriptive information.

That means putting key words in the videos filename. You can also put key words into the title, description and tags.

Second, the number of times your video is viewed is very important in achieving high rankings. The best way to get your video seen is to host your video on YouTube then embed the video into your site.

You can also embed links to the video on other landing pages within your site. Search engines will count all of the viewings of the video from all locations, so everything adds up to get you higher ranking.

If you have a number of videos (and you probably should), consider creating a video library on your site and help the search engine spiders find it by creating a video sitemap.

Go to the Google Webmaster Help to learn about Google's video sitemap feature. This sitemap protocol lets you publish and syndicate online video content to Google so that it can be searched in the Google Video index. Google can crawl the following video file types: .mpg, .mpeg, .mp4, .mov, .wmv, .asf, .avi, .ra, .ram, .rm, .flv.

Optimizing your video is an excellent way to climb the search engine rankings ladder.