31Aug YouTube Captions, useful for SEO?
I was uploading a video for my sister (a short film which was broadcast as a comedy short on the BBC, more info can be found on the page I’ve embedded it on) called Bathtime when I noticed I was presented with the option to add subtitles/captions, which is new.
The Youtube Blog reveals a little more information about the process and it’s already been picked up by the BBC and CNET among others. This new feature allows you to add subtitles in up to 120 languages.
My immediate thoughts were that, if the subtitles were located in an accessible file, that search engines might be able to find out a bit more information about what’s in a video. Having had a quick look, it seems this was overly optimistic, however it did get me thinking…
Recently I was looking at CSS and HTML captions for photos as can be seen in this example from Fox.com.au (I’m a big neighbours fan).
Here the green caption background is produced by CSS and standard HTML formatting for the caption text. This is done on most pages and I imagine they’ve managed to create a system where it’s easy to just input the size of an image to achieve the desired effect. Indeed the only real drawback to using this for every image is having to create a class for each image size. If you have standard image locations though it wouldn’t be much of a problem.
So, looking at the YouTube captions (and indeed they look like every other subtitle ever) a CSS class with a black background and some white text over the topmakes me wonder if a similar effect can be achieved for videos. Of course the added complication is adding timing to the text.
Ultimately I think the amount of time that’d have to be spent matching the subtitles up would be too great to be viable, but if a system could be made where videos can be marked then it could be a good way to optimise a video for different languages as well as the added value of the search engines knowing the video content.
Whilst I’ve no idea how to go about this, if it can be thought of it can be done! Of course that would usher in a whole new era of how to produce video content for the web, with presenters and writers now having to adapt the same way as traditional print writers have.
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January 21st, 2009 at 5:58 am
I would love to know if the captions/subtitles help with SEO too! If it did, that would be great and I would definitely add them to my videos since I upload promotional videos that my company produces.
January 21st, 2009 at 9:38 am
Hi Josh,
Obviously been a bit lax with my updates again, but thanks for stopping by.
YouTube captions probably aren’t going to help SEO in the traditionl sense. As far as I can tell it’s not kept as a set of metadata that the search engines can find.
If they ever make the data searchable or open up the ability to link in captions, then they’ll become a necessity.