I’ve already talked about videos on your site and how important it is for you to have one or two laying around. The problem is that, even though video enhances user experience, search engines and some visitors are not able to understand video content. That’s where captions come in.
Adding captions to your video will give search engines, hearing impaired and people who don’t speak your language the ability to read and understand the video.
When spiders crawl your site and they bump into a video, they only see your video’s file name (which should also be optimized) and move along. But if it’s a captioned video, and you’ve done it right, robots will be able to processes your captions file and give you much more credit for what you’ve done, thus helping your SEO efforts.
Captions also give hearing impaired users the ability to understand what you’re saying, obviously.
Video sharing sites like Youtube make it possible for the user to instantly translate your captions. Take Latincouver as an example; I’ve added captions to this video because, as a Latin American community in Vancouver, many of our target audience are not able to understand either Spanish or English.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SL7bFokr7Kk[/youtube]
You can add captions by paying for the services or you can do it yourself. Doing it yourself is super easy but yes, it can also be very time consuming. For this video I used a very straightforward Google Application called CaptionTube . Watch the CaptionTube tutorial and check it out.
What other situations would you think video captions would be good for?
[ad]
Leave a Reply