YouTube SEO comes in only a couple fashions: a good title, embedded in a few places, and I also think a transcript. When I create a video for my photoseo YouTube page, I always provide a transcript as well. This entails my listening to my own voice (always awkward) and typing everything I said in the video. I figured this would help get Google some extra keyword data when considering my video for rank.
I didn’t expect the transcript to show as subtitles while my video is playing. It matches the transcript to the actual words being spoken – their timing is incredible. Pretty cool feature if you ask me, especially for accessibility (web surfers with disabilities). Now you can read along with the video in YouTube, like I do when watching the movie Amélie, a killer foreign flick.
After doing 5 or so videos I noticed a button on the transcript page in YouTube where they offer to create a transcript for me (English: Machine Transcription). I thought to myself, YES! Thank you Google, who owns YouTube. I guess they can understand my voice now that I’ve given them my text a few times! On the contrary… I checked out one of these machine generated transcripts and it was waaaay off.
YouTube Machine Generated Transcript
Here is what I actually said:
- Hey I’m Zach Prez, here to answer some questions for you about blogging and search engine optimization
- The first question is why do I recommend blogs for photographers
- If you’re reading this post I suspect you already have a blog
- and may have noticed you end up ranking for a lot of different keywords
- that’s because every time you create a post
- you build a new page around a specific topic
Oh well, I give a B for effort.
The SEO relevance here is that a transcript should be able to help your video rank (if you upload one manually). I also put my transcript text into the post where I’m going to embed the video. The text surrounding the video helps it to rank better. Another benefit is just to have a YouTube account with a couple videos. Not only will that profile have a link to your main website (helpful for SEO), but its one more social account you can link to your Google Profiles page (get one today) and increase your chances of ranking in social searches.
