Attention Newspapers: Video Improves Your Google Ranking

If you don't have video on your Website, you jeopardize your chances of getting a top Google search ranking.

That's a lesson that newspapers should take to heart, judging from the advice of Bruce Clay, a veteran of the search engine optimization (SEO) industry.

In an interview with ReelSEO, Clay discusses what is known as "Engagement Objects" -- multimedia components such as MP3 audio files or videos that Web page visitors can interact with.

Whereas Google once used 120 variables to rank Websites, thanks to "engagement objects" its algorithms now incorporate 200.

In the case of video, we believe that as one of the more important engagement objects, Google has actually started to build it into the algorithm. That means if your Website has video on it, it is going to be received by the algorithm better and your site will actually have an opportunity to rank better.

A year from now, we are going to be sitting here saying, "If you don’t have video, if you don’t have engagement objects on your website, you are just not going to rank. It will make you last among equals if you don’t have it.”

This corroborates the findings of Nate Elliot at Forrester Research earlier this year, in his study, “The Easiest Way to a First-Page Ranking on Google.” He concludes:

“Not only are video results increasingly common in Google’s search results, but your videos stand a 50 times greater chance than your text pages of being shown on the first results page.”

Forrester's tips for optimizing video for best search results:

* Insert keywords into your video filenames.

* Host your videos on YouTube, and embed those YouTube videos into your own site. Google says its algorithms consider how many times a video is viewed, and any views embedded videos receive on your own site get added to the 'views' tally on YouTube. (And yes, nearly every video we saw Google blend into its results came from YouTube.)

* Optimize your YouTube videos by writing keywords into your videos' titles, descriptions, and tags.

* Embed videos into relevant text pages on your site. The context provided by the text on those pages (which is hopefully already optimized for search as well) will help the search engines figure out what your videos are about.

* Also create a video library on your site, so Google knows where to find your video content. (Google Video Sitemaps can help with this too.) Write keyword-rich annotations for each video in the library.

Many newspaper Websites bury their video, poorly annotate it, and make it impossible to navigate (from text story to video and back, or from one video to another). They would do well to heed the advice from marketing pros, and start affording their potentially most valuable asset better care and treatment!

Watch the video interview with Bruce Clay here.

Making it Easier to Find Good Video Stories

What makes our job at KobreGuide both challenging and valuable is that great videojournalism is so difficult to find -- and as for the little that exists, nobody hides it better than the media companies that produce it.

Although the situation has improved somewhat over the past couple years, most newspaper websites still treat their own video stories as bastard stepchildren -- relegating them to a bottom-tier ghetto section of their own website. If a viewer is fortunate enough to stumble into the off-the-beaten-path video annex at all, it is then an uninviting and often outright impossible task to stick around and look at other videos. Navigation is a nightmare. And good luck trying to find whatever text story might be related to the subject matter.

It's baffling enough for most web denizens that there is no industry standard when it comes to shape, size, and design of video players and their controls -- encountering each one anew requires embarking on yet another learning curve. Even those who proactively search for video stories on specific topics are stymied by the failure of search engines to find them.

Now we're starting to see the rise of companies such as ReelSEO that specialize in search engine optimization for videos. They've amassed an online series of tips and tutorials from the past year that's worth a look.

That's certainly one step in the right direction -- positioning and annotating your videos (e.g. with strategic keywords) so that people can locate them. But there's so much more work to be done with arranging, grouping and presenting online video so that it lures viewers and enables and even encourages them to see more. We are constantly amazed that even the titles assigned to projects that represent weeks or even months of preparation are so bland and uninspired.

Most newspapers got into the video business grudgingly, vaguely aware that this is the direction they should go because nothing else was working monetarily, and with the dim hope that it would somehow pay for itself someday. When that half-hearted approach didn't strike gold, some reacted by pulling back -- returning their videographers to the ranks of still photography, and making their print reporters relinquish their new vidcams and laptop editing software (often to the reporters' collective relief).

But others reacted by dipping a few more toes into the video pond, either out of hope or desperation, doubling down on their initial investment. Even so, embarassingly few have figured out how to put their wares on display -- newspaper video sections more closely resemble the jumbled shelves of a dusty pawn shop than an elegant Tiffany case.

Before a newspaper website can truly measure the value of its video, it first needs to bolster its quality, both journalistically and aesthetically, but then it also must candidly assess whether it's properly promoting its goods for maximum consumer appeal.