According to the best SEO agency of our time, the practice of optimizing a website for improved search engine results has changed drastically. Most people familiar with SEO understand that this marketing tactic is constantly changing. But SEO is about to go through a major evolutionary period, mainly because video content is taking over the internet.

Social Media Today says that “video is currently the most popular form of online content, with the medium especially dominant on Facebook and Twitter…By 2020, experts predict that there’ll be more than 200 million global VoD households, with Netflix, YouTube, Hulu leading the way in order of market share.”

But Video on Demand isn’t the only form of video content being circulated on the world wide web. Just think about how many times you have received (or sent) short clips of cuddly puppies or cooing babies. Or how many Delish videos have caught your attention with their yummier than ever recipes. Studies show that this type of content is quite literally taking over; it is being shared at a rate 1200% higher than the run-of-the-mill written content.

So what does this mean for SEO? According to the experts, this insane increase in video sharing means a lot will change for SEO. Specifically, this marketing strategy will focus on optimizing video content rather than the traditional written stuff. Want to know the basics on how to go about optimizing a video for your website? You can get started here.

What is Video SEO?

We’ve covered this very briefly, but here is the official definition of video SEO according to Techopedia: “Video SEO (vSEO) is the process of improving the ranking or visibility of a video invideo search engines or search engines in general, allowing it to show up, preferably, on the first page of results.”

Basically it means the same thing as SEO for written content and the main goal is to rank the video as high as possible on search engines. However, the practices involved in vSEO are completely unique to the strategies used in the SEO you’re already familiar with.

The Basic Steps Involved in Optimizing a Video

The very first step in vSEO is to choose an appropriate video hosting platform. In order to do this, you must ask yourself a few questions. What am I trying to accomplish with video ranking? This is the first question you should ask yourself since the answer will help to determine the best platform for posting the video.

For example, if you want to bring traffic to your official company website, the video should be posted exactly there: on your website. If engaging the general public and creating brand awareness is the goal, a video streaming platform like Youtube might be a better option.

After that, the process for optimizing a video is quite simple. There are a few differences between optimizing for words and optimizing for video, so it is important to research these before getting started. All in all, just do your best to start implementing more video content into your daily marketing routine.