December, 2009

Effective Websites Newsletter

Hi [FirstName],

This month I have news of a technology that can help you capitalize on the video on your website by making it fully searchable. In addition, the technology can make your videos more useful to your web site visitors. Read about this technology immediately below.

Dave Salahi

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Searchable Web Video

Video is proliferating on the web and that's led to a richer user experience for website visitors. But one downside of video is that the text within the video is not searchable. So, even though a website may have a video discussing the exact topic you're looking for, that website may not show up in the search results from Google, Bing or other search engines. If that video is on your website, that's a problem.

One approach to solving that problem is to also have text on the page containing the same keywords as the video. That will work but it means extra work for you and/or your web designer. And a written synopsis may not contain all the information that is discussed in the video. You could manually transcribe the entire video but that would probably take more time or money than you want to spend.

If you're using video on your website you need an easy solution to this problem. Videos are great but your customers still have to find you first. Fortunately, technology exists which can save you the time of manually making a transcript. The solution is automatic speech-to-text transcription. This is available in Adobe's Creative Suite of software which many web designers, including myself, use. With this approach, you let the software create the written transcript which you can then publish on your website where it can be found by search engines.

This solution has some additional benefits. Once a website visitor is at your site the visitor can search your video for a specific word and then jump right to the spot in the video where the word is found. After such a search, your video timeline displays markers showing each spot where the word was found. If there are multiple markers, your visitors can jump to each occurrence so that they can quickly find the content they are searching for.

This technology can also generate a tag cloud showing the most commonly spoken words. A tag cloud is a cluster of words with some shown in a larger font size while others are shown in a smaller size. The larger the font size the more frequently the word occurs in the video. Your visitor can click on a word in the tag cloud and see exactly where in the video the word is spoken. As with a custom search, he or she can then jump immediately to that location.

Accuracy

Computer speech recognition has made great strides but it's certainly not as good as humans at understanding the spoken word. So, you do have to realize that the written transcript is not going to be 100% accurate. Realistically, the top end for accuracy will probably be around 90%. And, to achieve that level of accuracy requires a clean audio track without background noise.

Still, that level of accuracy is more than acceptable for the purposes of search engine optimization. And, if you wish, you can manually correct the errors.

Sample

If you'd like to see an example of this technology in action, you can visit this demo page on my website.

Conclusion

There have been rumors that Google is doing some tests of indexing the spoken word in video. But as far as I know, there's nothing definite at this time. Eventually, the search engines may handle indexing for us. But, in the meantime, if you want to be found you have to use one of the approaches discussed in this article. If you're ready to get started with this technology or if you would just like to learn more please contact me at dave@artistic-webdesign.com or 949-362-0842.

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