If you're attempting to improve search rankings for your web pages, these days it's no longer an option not to optimize digital assets. With search engines incorporating video, images and news into standard search results, marketers have the opportunity to achieve increased visibility by implementing video SEO principles.

1. Optimize with keywords.

Just like any type of text-based content, video SEO involves optimizing with target relevant keywords - both for search engine sand for user experience. Use keywords in:

Beyond that, include a paragraph of optimized text that provides a brief description of the video. Again, the benefits are twofold: You'll improve the user experience and your search rankings.

• File name


• Title


• Tags


• URL


• Link text

2. Distribute videos on video-sharing sites.

In addition to posting videos on your own site, video-sharing sites are effective tools for gaining visibility and additional links. Remember these few points to maximize results:

• Don't forget that videos hosted on YouTube and other video-sharing sites should be optimized for keywords


• YouTube channel pages - and those of other video-sharing sites - should be optimized, as well


• Use a video distribution service like TubeMogul to deploy your videos to the top sharing sites
  

3. Implement a linking strategy.

Video is judged by the same linking standards as all other forms of digital content. So building both internal and external links is crucial for video SEO. Ideas for a linking strategy include:

• Cross-linking to other videos


• Linking to videos from relevant web pages


• Linking to videos in blog posts


• Tweeting the video


• Linking to videos from social media pages


• Bookmarking the video
  

4. Encourage viewers to share your videos.

First thing is first - if you want users to share your videos, you must create content worth sharing. If your video isn't interesting, relevant, entertaining or informative, users aren't likely to share it, let alone view it. From there:

• Allow and encourage users to comment on the video


• Make it easy for users to share your video on You Tube, Twitter, Facebook and MySpace


• Offer video content in multiple formats so users can choose the one that best suited to their platform and connectivity speed
  

5. Re-purpose your videos.

As with text content, the more optimized video, the better. Get creative in order to re-purpose videos across the web:

• Embed videos in blog posts


• Break up long videos and create multiple shorter ones


• Use transcriptions of videos to create blog posts or content for web pages


• Take screen shots from videos and post them to Flickr and other image-sharing sites


• Turn offline content, such as training videos or videos of a conference keynote speech, into optimized digital assets for your website