So you know that YouTube introduced auto-captions in limited availability last year. It was nice, but you didn’t give it much thought, right? Well, now is the time to start thinking about how YouTube auto-captions can benefit your SEO efforts.
YouTube just announced that they are going to open up all English videos to auto-captions. So, here’s what you should know:
- Any video with clear speech will benefit from auto-captioning.
- Avoid background noise, as it will make it harder for machine-generated translation to pick up and accurately caption the content.
- If you are the owner, you can improve the auto-captions by downloading and manually editing them.
- Captions can be translated into 50 languages even though auto-caption is only available in English at this time.
So how does this impact your SEO efforts? Now is the time to bring together your scriptwriter and your SEO writer for a little meet and greet. Text is king in the world of SEO and content is much easier to index than video. Your auto-captions are your text. So make that text work for you by building in those ever powerful keywords.
You can get more information on the tech specs for videos and captions on the YouTube site at:
https://www.google.com/support/youtube/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=100077
