Bruce Clay: Video as the Next Step for SEO

Some key points:

In an arena populated with so many different forms of content, the most engaging form of information is going to be the one that gets viewed. Search engines are working engagement into their ranking systems to provide the most relevant content for their users. Video keeps users engaged (from an average of 10 seconds on plain text sites to an average of 1.3 minutes over millions of viewers in our data). Search engines are on to this fact and have been for a while, as evidenced by Google’s acquisition of Youtube in 2006.

Due to the high engagement of video, it is already ranking very highly on search engines. Clay mentions the new “wall” of the first three organic results getting the response that the first page of results used to get. Video ranks very highly in current search engine results; the BlendTec “Will it Blend?” episode for the iPhone was the top ranked item on the highly contested iPhone search query for over three weeks.

While the technology does not yet exist for allowing search crawlers to “read” video as they currently read html, Clay hints that search engines are developing ways to transcript video. Embeddable flimps are already ahead of the curve, allowing for customizable html backtext that can be read by search crawlers to increase page rankings.

As internet marketing becomes more competitive, video may emerge to become a new standard of content delivery. If you have video and your competitor doesn’t, it’s likely that you will rank higher. As video becomes more prevalent on the internet, as Bruce Clay and other experts believe, text and images will simply not be enough to stay competitive. But those willing to step into the video arena first will be the ones to see the best returns.