Using Closed Captions to Help Google Find Your Videos

Not long ago I advocated putting captions on your videos help with readability for people who might not be able to listen to your videos. I also suggested that it would help people understand your message if they could read also.

But the method I had shown was rather cumbersome. It involved using Adobe Premiere Elements to manually enter the captions.

It seems that Google was quietly making a fool of me. 

From what I can tell back in November of 2008 YouTube (which is owned by Google) quietly instituted close captioning. For most of us who can hear normally, that might not be such big news. Well, other than adding captions for the reasons I mentioned above.

But in addition to the advantage for the hearing impaired, closed-captioning can also help your videos get noticed by Google. Without close captioning, the search engines have to rely on your titles, description, keywords, and any the text of any links that point back to your video from other sites.

With close captioning, search engines now have another piece of information by which to judge what your video is actually about. Search engines love content and the text file that goes along with your video for close captioning is perfect for them.

I did some looking around to make sure that it actually is true that Google will index these closed-captioned files. Other references I found is a site run by Matthew Bredel. In this blog post he details how he checked the indexing issue for himself and found text that could only have been from his closed-captioned file.

Another reference was YouTube itself. Here is a YouTube article that will get you started in learning everything you could possibly want to know about YouTube's close captioning system.

One of the services I'm going to try out for creating captions is CaptionTube. They appear to be easy to use, but  will not know for sure until I try them out.