YouTube captions boost SEO

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Monday, 11 July 2011 16:40pm

Adding captions to a YouTube video can improve your search engine optimisation and increase your audience to include the Deaf and hearing impaired, those learning English and those wishing to view your video without sound (e.g. in a noisy or busy environment).

By captioning your YouTube video, Google can index not only the title, description and tags of your YouTube video, but also the video content. This increases your search ranking, and the likelihood that your video will appear higher in Google and YouTube search results. This also results in more relevant ads in YouTube videos.

YouTube captions are also presented to the user as interactive transcripts, which show a video’s captions as a time-coded transcript located underneath the video. You can jump to a particular location within the video using the transcript, allowing you to find content in a video quickly.

Captions also broaden your audience reach to include non-English speaking viewers. With Google Translate, users can automatically translate the English captions that you’ve added to your YouTube video into 50 different languages. You can also choose to upload captions in multiple languages.

View this short YouTube video demonstrating how YouTube and Google index closed captioning.

Visit our Online Media section to find out how to caption your YouTube videos and how to use the features within captioned YouTube videos.


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