Videos Are 53 Times More Likely To Get a Page One Google Ranking
By Anna Johnson on February 10th, 2010Properly submitted online videos are 53 times more likely to get a first page Google ranking than conventionally optimized webpages. That’s the finding of a recent study by Forrester Research, as quoted by Benjamin Wayne in Search Engine Watch.
So why does Google love online videos so much?
Firstly, by displaying videos in its search results, Google meets its objective of presenting mixed media search results for a given search query. Secondly, not only is there relatively little online video content available for the average search query, but very little of the available video content is properly submitted to search engines and therefore in Google’s index.
The upshot is that you have a much higher chance of getting a video on page one of Google than you do a regular HTML page.
So how do you make sure your online video is indexable by Google (and the other search engines)?
Basically, you want to follow the relevant search engine submission guidelines as they apply to video. In most cases this will mean submitting both the video and the page displaying the video.
Benjamin Wayne recommends submitting a permalink sitemap that mirrors the video XML feed, with title tags on the permalink pages identical to the video title to achieve the highest page rank scoring.
If you are using a third party video platform provider you also want to make sure that links point back to your site, not that of the video platform provider.
Source: Benjamin Wayne, “Search Engine Success: Getting Video SEO Right,” Search Engine Watch, Jan 27, 2010
