There is a lot of talk out there in the blog-o-sphere about how to promote your video on YouTube and how to use YouTube and other 3rd party hosting sites to increase your SEO and get traffic to your site through video content. However, sometimes using a third party service isn’t always an option. 

Self Hosting is a Must for Some People

For example, if you run a porn or adult-industry focused site. Especially if, like my company extremerestraints.com (plug!), you’re running a good, honest, above-the-board business since, while you can post it, you’ll get banned real quick because it’s hard to do a how-to video without naked models for adult products. Extreme Restraints has lots of videos that would drive massive amounts of traffic, especially on places like YouTube, but the user and community use guidelines restrict posting because they don’t want to do age and compliance guidelines. So, we’re now working on optimizing our on-page videos.

Even if you run a completely legit, smut-free website, you might not want to use a third-party hosting service because of their built-in ability to outrank you. This was well covered in January by Rand in his whiteboard video on this issue. In a nutshell, these sites rank very highly and have huge authority but little ability to pass that on to you, so you don’t want to be competing with them for ranking on the same video you have on your site. You’ll be outgunned. 

The problem is then is how do you optimize your video?

Optimizing Videos

The easiest way to describe how to optimize a self-hosted video is to think of each video as its own page. You have to give it a compelling title, keyword rich URL tag, relevant keyword tags, and link to it with good anchor text. In addition, if you don’t mind your content being shared and if you want to create a viral video, you need to have an ability for other people to embed your video in their site.

First, figure out the essentials (like title, etc). When you self-host, you’ll have a file somewhere in your FTP structure that holds your video. Make sure that when you create your video uploading structure you think of the video file like you would a URL. That means instead of /BedRestraintKit.sfw (or whatever extension) you want /bed_restraint_kit.sfw. Some video uploaders make this harder to do, so talk with your programmer. In addition, make sure that the file name and your video title are not only keyword rich, but also catchy. I also encourage having a good ‘splash picture’ or screenshot that will appear before the video is clicked on and loaded since this is what will appear in the in-line search results.

Next, you’ll need to do some alt-tagging on your video. This is important not just for SEO, but also for accessibility. If someone doesn’t have flash in their browser, the alt-text is what they’ll see. If someone is blind, the alt-text is what they’ll hear. As of writing this, googlebot is BOTH blind and doesn’t read flash, so it needs all the help it can get to figure out how to index the file. These alt-tags are put in surrounding HTML code. We’ll get you the exact code for a flash video embedding next.

Finally, if you want to create a viral video which people can embed on their own site, you’ll need a way to provide them with the embedding link/code to make that happen. This is usually done through a generated code snippet that people can copy from your site and paste onto theirs. Note, however, that these embeddings are not thought to provide link juice since they reference the file name of your video, not the page that your video is on. However, I’ve not been able to find a good A/B testing on this (SEOmoz, want to do some experiments?). Include a reference to your site in the video to continue to drive traffic to your site!

Embedding Code

So you’re ready to embed a flash video. You’ll want to use this code:

Within the code you can include regular 

tags and optional PARAM tags and text or links that will appear when flash is not installed. I’d put in the following, at least:

Video Descriptive keyword-rich text

This will not only provide alternative text when people can’t/aren’t using flash, it also gives the search engines a whole bunch more information about how to index your video.

Video Sitemap

Once you’ve got your videos all tagged up appropriately, you’ll want to make sure that Googlebot can find all your videos. A video sitemap (put a link in your footer, like you would your regular sitemap!) will direct the Googlebot to all your videos. Google has a great guide here about how to do this. I won’t repeat it, except to say that’s why I hire other folks *grin* better in HTML than I am. Find it here: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=80472 .

Any other suggestions? Comments? Thoughts? Have you found that using something else works better?