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Closed Captioning and Video SEO
These days, more and more people are putting videos on the internet, they can be anything from instructional and educational, to a live political event. There are also many more (millions) videos online than are simply accessed over the internet - i.e.: they can’t be seen. The main reason a sites video content is not properly indexed can be attributed to: lack of simple cross-promotion as well as improper search engine optimization. So what are ones options to improve video index ability?
One of the options is to add closed captions to your video - this is a easy way to ‘contextualize’ the content of the video and get some targeted or non-targeted traffic to your website. This tactic also makes your video accessible to those with hearing impairments and PCs without speakers (an added bonus too!). One can also effectively use multiple translation techniques for providing multiple language captions to drive more traffic.
So, what is closed captioning?
Closed captioning is basically a technique of displaying different synchronized captioned text only when requested by a user. Closed captioning is not just the text that displayed right at the bottom of the screen representing the dialog in the video; it will also include any environmental sounds like that of humming birds, ringing of phones, sound of knocking, thunder, rain splashing etc. A closed caption will inform the viewer when music is played or where the following picture is from, about laughter, tears and even a speakers gestures etc.
According to common web accessibility guidelines or best practices, captions should always be synchronized in such a way that it is equivalent to the spoken word and should also be easily accessible to anyone who requires it.
Normally, closed captioning will make you think of what is referred as ‘embedded captioning’. This basically means that captions are added directly to the multimedia file. There are certain user benefits of all closed captioning as we will see below:
User Benefits
The users as well as the provider of the video with closed captioning have a lot to benefit from the entire process. By adding closed captioning, one will be able to make your video more accessible to different types of users and people who in a given scenario might not be able to understand the video.
Video SEO Benefit
More often than not, online accessibility issues as well as SEO principles are inter-connected. You may have seen many times that some of the SEO techniques are exactly similar to the accessibility guidelines followed by webmasters. This is mostly due to the fact that spiders rely heavily on all text related elements within a page. Simply said: Make it easy to index people!!!
Closed captioning is great for accessibility and even for driving traffic - but it will not be completely search engine optimized especially after being embedded within a multimedia file. To enhance SEO for video captioning, the best route to follow is having a media transcript, so that both SEO and indexing issues are taken care of. The media transcript will have all the content that is there in the video and can’t be read by search engine spiders. By following this method, you will be able to ensure that your target audience gets to see the video as well as understand the content and also benefit from SEO.
By Jeremy Hermanns | July 31, 2008 | Filed Under SEO Advice
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