You’ve created a great video to market your business’ products or services, and you know it’s really something special. How can you get Google to take note of your video and start displaying it in the SERPs?

SEO optimizing videos actually isn’t all that difficult— in fact, you do it the same way you optimize text or any other page on your website. Here are a few easy steps for optimizing your video to catch Google’s (and your audience’s) attention.

1. Upload it to YouTube.

While Vimeo is a great platform for videos, YouTube belongs to Google, and we’ve seen that Google tends to promote content hosted through its own services before it promotes content posted elsewhere. Putting your content on YouTube will make it much more likely it’s indexed by Google, and displayed in the search results.

2. Build a landing page on your site for the video.

With Drupal, this is incredibly easy— simply go to Content > Add Content > Basic Page, and build out a landing page for your video. Include keyword-optimized links to blog posts, your contact page, and information about your company’s products and services to maximize the chance that you get conversions off of the video. Then, in your WYSIWIG editor, embed the video itself using the “Share” feature that YouTube has. It’s easy!

Tips:

• If you're embedding the video into the body of a node directly, be sure to use "Full HTML" filter (or ask your admin to set up the proper filter for you to use).
• If your site uses https, you can select the “Use HTTPS” option under the embed code or Protip: delete the "http:" from the embed url and Youtube will serve the proper and secure format. In other words, href="//www.youtube.com/embed/yI-i0x8S39c"

3. Optimize that page.

Including title tags, meta tags, and keywords, and making sure that those tags match up the video titles is an easy way to boost your rankings. Write descriptions that incorporate keywords in the order they are listed. NOTE: Video SEO will consume much less of your time if you have a video-friendly content manager— and Drupal has some really great video-friendly modules that we recommend you check out.

4.  Submit a video sitemap through Google Webmaster Tools.

Google knows you’ve got a video, but not what it’s about. Generating or building a site map for each video will tell search engines where the video is (your site), its original location (YouTube) and what it’s about (how awesome you are).

5. Make sure your website has a robots.txt file that includes your XML and video site maps.

We’ve written a bit about this before— having a proper robots.txt file is crucial to even the most basic SEO success. The robots.txt file lets the search engines know what they can and can't index and must be uploaded to the top-level directory of your site (directly after the .com, .net, .org, etc.). For more information on putting together a robots.txt file for Drupal, check out this great post by Ben Finklea.

6. Write out the transcript from the video. 

Search crawlers can’t read the contents of video, so include the transcript of the video so the text can tell the crawlers what the video is about.

And that’s it! Video SEO is easy— especially with the right tools and modules. For help getting your Drupal site set up for SEO, contact us at Volacci, or read our blog for more Drupal marketing tips and trips.

Video can be a great tool in your Drupal Marketing toolkit. Here's how.video seo, Planet Drupal