Time to read: 2 minutes. Like me, you are cranking out video content to attract customers in search engines. Even after going through a long list of SEO (optmization) tactics I discovered my video not showing up in search results on Google and YouTube. Dazed and confused I finally found out what I was doing wrong.
In short, I was doing everything right... except making sure Google's gigantic brain understood what THE most important item on my blog page---the darned video!
"The solution is, as you might have guessed, rather simple," says Joost de Valk of Yoast.com. "It’s a hard balance to get though: Google still doesn't understand the video itself, so it needs some content around the video to understand what the video is about."
Producing valuable video content that potential customers need and surrounding it with lots of text-based content (an article) seems smart. Especially when there's so much evidence supporting the idea: LONG articles get ranked high in Google.
But BEWARE: There is a "sweet spot" when it comes to video.
At some point you will confuse Google by putting too much text on the page.
Aim at the “sweet spot”
“Give it 2-300 words, meaningful tags and a good title and you’ll be a long way there,” says Joost.
Let’s say you have a long article and a video. Joost suggests I would creating two posts. He says you’ll need to make judgement call.
“If you think your site is strong enough to rank with two results in the top 10 for a given query, target the same keyword. You might get a text result and a video result in the same search results page,” he says.
He recommends if you have any doubts to optimize the video post for your target keyword and link from the content post to the video listing on YouTube. You might be able to boost your own video result into the search results, as ranking with a video tends to be easier than ranking with a text result.
Make sure you’re doing this too
Ultimately you want potential customers to find your videos on Google, click on the video listings and watch them on your blog. Yes, having good rankings via YouTube itself is also important. This gives you opportunity to create links back to your blog—from within the video itself—via the Annotations function. (calls to action!)
If your YouTube videos are not showing up in search results be sure you are doing “the basics.” Optimize them by:
- Posting videos on YouTube
- Immediately uploading written transcripts filled with keywords your target market uses (example: to discover answers to problems they’re looking to solve)
- Tagging your videos similarly
- Titling videos based on your keyword research (keywords your customers are using right now in Google search)
- Filling YouTube video descriptions with keyword-dense copy
Be sure to invest in Yoast’s Video SEO plugin for WordPress to make it a quick, no-brainer on the technical side.
Bottom line
Video not showing up in search results? You might be confusing Google. Be careful to NOT surround your videos with too much text.
If you go over 300 words you risk Google not “understanding” the “main dish” on your page—the darned video. There is a quantitative “sweet spot” for text.
Proof that it works? Check it out! http://www.google.com/search?q=blogging+for+business+course
Photo Credit: Andrew_B
What if your youtube video is NOT embedded in a blog or other text document? What if it’s just a video, one of only a few out there on the topic, yet some other guy’s video on the topic is the only one that shows up in Google web searches? His video has less than half the number of views that mine has, and nowhere near as much relevant text or keywords. The only reason I can think of is because his was uploaded before mine, and Google just hasn’t caught up yet to the fact that mine has replaced his as the one with the most views, since mine has only been online for a little over a week. Is that probably the reason?
Possibly, Eric. Google’s YouTube algorithm is a mystery. It DOES, however, factor in the number of views heavily… you’re right.
Well i uploaded a video 4 days ago and it doesn’t appear in searches even when i type exactly the title.
Typing the exactly the same title will not do your job. Google and YouTube rank videos according to the #mystery. Keyword search comes alot below in rank because many youtubers post fake videos giving them a nice title.
We are conducting spoken English classes. There I have upload my video
and name it as (Spoken English dialogues Part 2 by AMS)
also taged keywords for the video as spoken English , English Speaking
but non of them shows up when I search using key word or if anybody searches too
please be kind enough to help me on this questuion
Dude you’re a lifesaver! Went straight to mfy description and deleted all the bloat from it and bingo I was in the search results.
For some of the search words in Google, no videos show up at all, not mine but also none of anybody else. Why is that?
Example: you write: “Proof that it works? Check it out! http://www.google.com/search?q=blogging+for+business+course” but no videos appear here at all…
Any idea why your video only displays in the video results but not in the “All” results?
I uploaded a video for the new YouTube
Permission to Dance challenge and included all the hashtags required, but when I searched permission to dance challenge on YouTube, I couldn’t find my own video, but there were loads of other videos even when I scrolled till there were no more results and still couldn’t find mine.