The Web has changed a lot since I first saw it in 1995. Back then pages all had gray backgrounds, black text in Times New Roman, and links were always in blue and underlined. If you were lucky there might be one photograph on a page. Search Engine Optimisation was not something many people thought about back in those days. Although search engines such as Alta Vista and Excite were in existence SEO work consisted mainly of making sure that the description and keyword meta-tags were completed.

Times have changed, nowadays we are used to seeing video and audio files embeded into web pages. We are often told that the various spiders that crawl our sites can only see text. We are also told that video content ranks highly with Google. These two statements seem to be at odds with each other but in actual fact you can include video footage on your site, you just need to know how to optimise it so that Google will rank it.

You have two options with where your video clips are stored. You can either host them yourself on your own domain (which will usually mean that they can only be viewed by visitors to your domain) or you can upload them to a video sharing site such as YouTube. Whichever you choose as your preferred option there are some simple guidelines that will make your video clip more easily found by robots.

• Try to make your clips in 4:3 aspect. YouTube tends to crop video so that it fits this size, so you would be better making sure that it is shot in that format so that the meaning of your clip is not lost
• When you allocate your clip a file name ensure that it is meaningful and seperate each word with a hyphen e.g. search-engine-optimisation-clip.avi
• Before uploading the clip right click on it and select “Summary” give your clip a keyword rich description

By following these basic steps you will find that Googlebot and other bots will be able to index your clip even though they cannot see and hear the clip itself. They recognise that filetype and as has already been said Google ranks video very highly, so it is worth having some video clips on your site.

“Hang on, Michael, you have no video on your site” you are no doubtless thinking. Well I took possession of a camcorder today and I intend to practice a little with it first, but look out in the near future for my own video blog posts.

If you use video on your site do let me know, I’m interested in finding out how different people and companies utilise this form of communication.