Metadata can help advertisers target ads to video content

By including tags and transcriptions in online video content, advertisers can increase the relevance of the products they are advertising by linking with relevant shows.

Another benefit of metadata lies in the boost it provides to video SEO – according to RAMP, the web content optimisation company, simply by including a series of tags and transcriptions in online video, engagement can increase by up to 300%.

The commercial benefits of metadata have the potential to be significant, RAMP argues: “Video content is weighted much higher than text content by the major web search engines – a fact that is a reflection of the growing interest in rich media on the web.

“This means that not only are SEO-friendly web video pages far more likely to be found if they have transcripts, they are much more likely to appear on the first page of an internet search result.

“This is a reality that is critical to monetising content online.”

Having traditionally been used alongside books, in order to record information such as the book title, author, date of publication and ISBN number, metadata is a relatively new concept for video.

However, there are a host of successful examples of metadata usage – Fox Sports recently used RAMP tools such as video SEO and tagging, which enabled the broadcaster to double its search traffic in the first four months.

Crackle, a Sony subsidiary, incorporated metadata in order to improve site search and refine closed captioning, leading to a 25% increase in search volume across the first six months.

In addition to this, Crackle experienced a doubling in traffic from search engines to video and image landing pages.

Read the full MediaPost article here.