Video casts and SEO

[NewBeginnings]

I have a client whos site contains a lot of video casts. They want to do SEO however, to view the videos you must register (it is free). But I was thinking that if the viewer needs to register can the spiders still get in to crawl the video files?

Should .avi file extensions be changed to something that is more SE friendly?

[monkeythumpa]

It doesn't matter what format the video is in for search, although there are better technologies for streaming video over the web than .avi. I would suggest Flash.

So here is the problem . . . the spiders are not smart enough to watch the video and figure out what it is about. You have to either tag it, create a transcript, or both. Tagging it is good, but you are only going to show up in video searches. If you provide a transcript, the spiders will send people to that page because of the targeted content on it.

If you have to register, the spiders won't find the content. The spiders that try to register you don't want. Try making the transcript available to anybody and then having them register to view the video.