Lately search engines, like Google, have been becoming more video friendly. However unless you properly optimize your video content, it can be a challenge for search engine ’spiders’ to find them.

At first the complete video SEO (Search Engine Optimization) strategy may seem a bit overwhelming and time consuming. But you will find that most of the steps quickly become second nature and the increased traffic to your videos is well worth the work.

I’ve decided to break the ‘SEO Tips’ into bite size posts that I will release over the next few weeks. This way you can digest them one at a time and implement them organically into your workflow.

Naming Your Video Files:

This is a very often overlooked tactic; properly naming of your files is important as it is one of the first things search engines spiders look at to identify what it is.

• You should name your files with accurate identifying keywords. Including the word ‘video.’
• Use hyphens (dashes) to separate words and to make keywords stand out. Is using  hyphens better than an underscore? At least for Google SERPs (search engine result pages) it looks to be. Read Matt Cutts comments on the topic.
• Use lower case characters in your titles. This will avoid issues for Unix systems that are case sensitive. For example you could post a file titled ‘Cool-Stuff-Video.flv, but it might be processed as ‘cool-stuff-video.flv.’ by a SERP but therefore would link to the wrong file on a Unix system. This sort of thing is rare but to be safe I would stick to lower case.
• How long should your file name be? I have yet to find a good argument for a set max character length, but I would keep it under 50 characters. It’s good to be relevant, descriptive and use prime keywords but you don’t want it to look too long or spammy. You will also be using longer titles and descriptions so there is no need to go overboard in naming your video files.
• Do not change previously named and published video files, as they may already be indexed or linked to.

Tags: length of file name, naming files, seo file name, using hyphens in titles, Video SEO, video serps

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 17th, 2009 at 10:39 pm and is filed under Strategy, Techniques, Tips, Video SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.