Search Marketing News

YouTube captions 'huge for SEO'

November 24th 2009
Social Media Optimisation News

Google has launched an automatic video captioning service for YouTube videos which experts say will have great benefits for search engine optimisation (SEO) campaigns.

While the captioning feature is still in its raw stages, theoretically video scripts will give content from YouTube - which was founded in 2005 and bought out by Google a year later - a stronger online presence.

The official Google blog stated that captions not only help deaf and hearing impaired internet users, but with machine translation they also enable people around the world to access video content in any of 51 languages.

"Captions can also improve search and even enable users to jump to the exact parts of the videos they're looking for," the blog added.

With few videos currently being captioned on the web, Andrew Shotland, owner of Local SEO (search engine optimisation) Guide in California, said he would not be surprised if YouTube traffic went "through the roof".

"Having targeted text on a page helps the video rank in search engines for specific searches," explained Mr Shotland, "so having a transcript in the video is huge for SEO".

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