In coaching my clients (and in my Social Media Content Creation Kit) I encourage taking advantage of the power of already-created content, like YouTube videos, articles, etc.

I also have many clients and readers that would much rather record a video (or create a photo montage) than sit down and write up an article for their blog – the power of video is amazing, and this is a great way to market yourself online. But there is a downside!

Videos and photos give you absolutely no SEO benefit. It’s kind of like creating a project for school, only to find out you didn’t earn any credit for it!

The reason is that search engine spiders cannot watch a video or see a photo – if there’s no text on the post, they have NO idea what the post is about. And so they have no reason to index it. Search engines are all about providing good content in their search results and in their eyes, you don’t have any content on that post.

So how do you earn SEO credit from your videos and photos?

By making sure you appropriately tag them, as well as your blog posts.

People new to blogging are often confused by tags, so here is a quick explanation – tags are simply keywords! You can tag your post, you can tag your images, you can tag your videos on YouTube and other videos sites, etc. So how do you make tags your new best friend for better SEO?

• Take advantage of the “Post Tags” field in your WordPress blog to add keywords that will tell the search engines what the post is about
• Make sure you have “alt tags” for all your photos. In WordPress, this is really easy to do! While you’re Inserting a photo, add some keywords or a description of the post to the “Caption” field and voila! You’ve tagged your photo and given the search engine a better idea of what the post is about (note: describing the photo itself is not very search engine helpful – do you really want the search engines to think your post is about a “business woman drinking coffee”, or something like that? No! So use keywords from your post – what the picture symbolizes for the post)
• If you upload your videos to YouTube (or other video sites) and embed from there, then take advantage of YouTube’s tag feature. It will help for search engine friendliness on their site. But on your own site, you will also want to add a quick sentence describing what the video is about, and why someone should watch it. One - because search engines can’t watch the video for themselves. And two - because the video won’t come through in your RSS feed or in someone’s email, and you want to encourage them to come back to your site and actually watch the video.

This doesn’t mean that you have to give up video blogging since you have to write anyway. One simple sentence is enough to at least give the search engines info on what the post is about so they can index it. And there really is power in video. So just be sure to take that extra step of tagging your photos, videos and posts, and you should start to see improved SEO in no time!