Nowadays, we are constantly bombarded with information from a myriad of different sources. After all, this is a natural consequence of the Internet permeating every aspect of our society. With desktop systems, laptops, tablets, smartphones, smartwatches, and the emerging IoT (Internet-of-Things) devices, the time we spend online is only going up. Thus, it’s important to optimize videos on your WordPress website to get the most of them
One potential side-effect of having so many different stimuli at our fingertips is a significant decrease in attention span. Science is still inconclusive on the topic. However, studies have shown that the average human attention span went from 12 seconds all the way down to 7 seconds in the period between 2000 and 2016. That leaves you with less time to pique the interest of your site’s visitors. Also, it makes it difficult to retain it until you get your point across.
One successful approach is to use several different media formats to keep your content varied enough. It may sound a bit simplistic. However, colorful images and graphics do work, and so does including videos on your site and as part of your marketing toolkit. A short but concise video can be far more impactful when it comes to convincing users to buy a certain product This is because it provides an experience closer to the real world. Additional benefits include improving conversion rates and the likelihood of generating incoming links rather than text pages.
If you plan to introduce videos to your WordPress site, you must make sure that you are getting the absolute maximum of what they can offer. This involves incorporating suitable techniques that optimize videos for SEO. SEO or Search Engine Optimization cannot be neglected when it comes to pushing your site forward and attracting visitors.
Where To Host And Optimize Videos
Let’s say that you have produced a high-quality video with a lot of potential. The next step is to decide where to upload it, and the choice may have great repercussions. The first option is to host the clip directly on your WordPress site, where it will be on display automatically in an HTML 5 player. This is NOT recommended as it could put massive pressure on your bandwidth. If you allow visitors to further embed the video on their own sites, the impact on your site’s bandwidth will be multiplied each time the embedded video launches.
Furthermore, to manage your video uploads and ensure that the clips are displayed properly, you may need to add plugins, leading to increased server load. On a shared web hosting service, it could result in incurring additional fees for extra bandwidth. If the situation is severe enough, the site may even get suspended or temporarily taken down.
You should never jeopardize the speed of your site. Slow loading pages could be detrimental when it comes to attracting visitors and generating engagement. In fact, having a site that is well-optimized for speed and performance is crucial for success.
Use Third-Party Hosts
Instead of trying to host the videos yourself, take advantage of the benefits offered by third-party video sites. Take YouTube, for example; it is both the world’s second-largest search engine and the second most visited website. By uploading your videos there, you can easily embed them in your WordPress site without having to deal with any of the associated issues. It will also facilitate easy sharing, and the video could potentially go viral.
Having a presence on video-sharing platforms is important for creating visibility and attracting traffic. The service will attempt to determine the quality and speed of the viewer’s Internet connection and adjust the video’s resolution accordingly. Other benefits may include the automatic generation of captions to boost accessibility, potential revenue from advertising, valuable analytical data about the viewers, and more.
Pick The Right Keywords
Although videos are a graphical medium, many aspects of their publication are entirely dependent on text. These include the title, description, and tags. Start your research by seeing which keywords are trending or popular among your targeted userbase. While it may sound complicated, you don’t need a specialized research service to do this. You can achieve sufficient results via the Google Ads keyword planning tool.
When deciding on the exact keywords to use, pay attention to the way they sound in tandem with the surrounding text, especially in the title and description. You would want a natural and organic flow. If it fits, try to include the main keyphrase at the start of the title. At the same time, avoid being overindulgent and filling the texts with repeated keywords.
Further Optimization
Exactly like Google, YouTube also has a set of criteria for its internal algorithms. It is vital to know the factors you should look out for. Some are obvious, such as the number of views, positive or negative reactions, number of comments, the number of subscribers of the creator, etc. Others can be a bit more subtle. The total average watch time measures the average point at which viewers stop the video, how often the video is added to users’ list, the number of times it has been embedded in other pages, and more.
The title is among the first things that people see, so spending an adequate amount of time on it is going to be worth it. Make it catchy but try to avoid going into clickbait territory. As we said earlier, you should also try to include your main keyphrase at the start, or the end as a second choice, of the title. If it doesn’t work, however, don’t stress too much over it.
As for the description, you can afford to be a bit more creative here. The goal is once again to include the chosen keywords, but that should not come at the expense of the main purpose of this field – to adequately describe the video itself. Adding a transcript may be a good choice. It allows all necessary keywords to include in an organic manner while also helping viewers. A transcript is particularly suitable for shorter videos that cover complex or confusing topics.
Optimizing Your WordPress Video Gallery
Do you plan to create a dedicated video gallery on your WordPress site? In that case, you have to consider two crucial requirements when it comes to SEO – optimize videos so they are readable by the search engine’s bots, and they must be indexable. In practical terms, this means that the bots need to be able to see the videos without actually playing them and that each video has to be on a unique URL that it can be associated with.
You can meet the first requirement by using asynchronous loading. Doing so loads all of the scripts on the page simultaneously, preventing any potential slowdowns. The video will load automatically, so it is ready to play whenever the user hits the button while also being accessible for the bots.
The technique used to create your video gallery will be vital when it comes to determining how indexable it is. There are multiple approaches that offer a different degree of indexing. The execution that provides the best result when it comes to this particular goal involves creating a new page for each video. Each page then loads when the user selects it. Unfortunately, this method has a noticeable drawback affecting the user experience as loading a whole new page just for another video can lead to a less visually appealing presentation. A site with good SEO, however, can largely mitigate this problem by having sufficient page load speeds.
It is very important to optimize videos as they are becoming the most popular medium for consuming content, and adopting this trend as part of your WordPress site could be extremely beneficial. Couple it with SEO video optimization, and you could start enjoying a healthy growth in visitors and potential customers.