I’ll jump right into the most popular form of video today – YouTube. YouTube is owned by Google and has a search function built in. It is searched more than Bing and Yahoo, thus making it the 2nd largest search engine in the world only behind Google itself (combined with Google thus totally dwarfing Bing!, if that’s possible to imagine).
So back to SEO now. YouTube now provides Transcription Service so you can download a text transcription of videos on the web. So far so good. So you have a video and plug it into your site. Great. Now what? Google can’t “read” the words so how would it know what’s on your page unless you provided a transcript for Google to read, and thus for Google to lead them to? I personally have other questions, such as “if Google can create a transcription then why can’t it just ‘know’ what’s in the video from YouTube embedded on the web page already without having to use a transcript?” …and if not, then let’s take it a step further – “What happens when someone downloads a transcription of a video and pastes the text into their own website and the originator of the video doesn’t even have that content written out and posted on his own site? Who does Google give credit to as the author then?”
Ok – so all that said – the connection between SEO and Video should now be blindingly obvious – video uploaded to YouTube, then transcribed and that transcription now added as text onto your own web site below your posted video goes a long way to building your site’s own content. Next step, after a week or so (so Google gets to establish your content) you can re-post the transcribed text in your video’s own description page on YouTube so it shows up double duty in that search engine as well. Two birds with one stone.
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