In my December 17, 2010 article, I wrote about the potential of online video captions for improving searchability of specific video content. This week, Rob Colling of InternetSubtitling.com blogged to say it is starting to become a reality:
We’ve been evangelising about the power of captions and subtitles for SEO [Search Engine Optimization] for a long time now. A closed caption file is a form of text file, after all, and it stands to reason that storing what is effectively a text transcript of your video on your site is likely to make the video content more accessible to search engines….
But it’s been hard to turn up concrete evidence to prove that captions and subtitles affect SEO… until now. In the last few months it’s become clear that YouTube’s search results are visibly affected by the caption and subtitle tracks on certain videos.
In the video clip below, Jay Wyant, a former marketing director of CaptionMax, demonstrates a powerful business case for captioning online videos. Which may be why YouTube’s acquisition of Next New Networks might mean more for search engine king Google (YouTube’s parent company) than just being a new competitor in the increasingly crowded professional video content space.