Search engine crawlers are sophisticated programs that scour the internet and determine the kind of results users get from search engine queries. Any Chicago videographer has known for some time that hosting videos on a website is an effective way to improve your search engine optimization (SEO), along with having an easy to find site map and using content-appropriate keywords throughout. But search engine giant Google has adjusted the how its crawlers mine the web for information, and boosting SEO is easier than ever.
According to a recent post on ReelSEO, Google is now indexing websites (or blogs) that have video production embedded on their site. In other words, if there’s a famous music video on YouTube that you post to your own website, Google will recognize the presence of that video and calculate it when determining which search results to provide users. In the past, videos had to be embedded directly into a site’s code in order for a crawler to recognize them. Hence the need for a site map. But even that need is gone.
Until now, it was impossible to get indexed in Google Videos with YouTube embeds on your site, even with a properly formed sitemap (trust me, I conducted testing with almost every publishing method and variant you can think of.) There were a few work-arounds, but these were not well known and would probably be considered a bit of a hack. The reason for this was that Google/YouTube was “ignoring” any sitemap entries that pointed to YouTube.com assets and not allowing sites to get indexed through a YouTube embed.
-Mark R Robertson, ReelSEO
Putting a video on YouTube and directing it to your site is now more valuable than ever for a Chicago videographer. Not to mention easier than figuring out how to code something in. For help with all your marketing or video production projects, visit Video One Productions to see what we can do for you.
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