(updated 15 Oct 2013–last sentence)

And it’s a good one.

Not sure when this happened, so I might be slow on the draw.

I’d been hearing about the facility of uploading transcriptions for videos recently.

Sounds like a lot of bother, doesn’t it?

And that’s why I didn’t jump on it, so it went on the “to do” list, waiting for the day I’d have nothing better to do than sit around tediously transcribing videos.

Turns out, it’s no bother at all!

As serendipity would have it, I stumbled on a blog that explained the process and the benefits. Not only does a transcript allow search engines to index and rank the content of your videos, you can also publish the transcripts in various ways to various sites as articles–all of which increases the profile of your video, and/or points back to your site.

When I went into my YouTube edit window and clicked on the “Captions” button (the first step), I was stunned to find that there was ALREADY an automatic caption feature in place, something not mentioned in the blog I had read. The entire video was already transcribed with voice recognition technology!

Of course, it wasn’t perfect, but it was pretty darn good.

So what I did was download the automatic captions with the handy “download” button, spent a few minutes correcting the errors, then uploaded the finished transcript labeling it as “English transcript”. I made sure the title of the transcript contained key words and that the first line of the YouTube video description contained the exact link to the page where the video appears on my web site.

Now when that video comes up anywhere there is an icon that indicates the availability of a transcript.

When you click on the icon, amazingly, the transcribe moves along phrase by phrase in synchronization with the video as it plays.

Furthermore, you can use the transcript to go back to an exact point in the video that you might want to watch again.

I find this positively AMAZING.

Now, on my own site, the Home Page and the main service pages all contain videos I made specifically to introduce the site and those services, all of which are transcribed and indexable by Google.

It also answers the question I posed some time back in an article:  “How in the world is Google going to index video content?” -since all indications have been that video content is the future of the internet, and we know Google didn’t buy YouTube for its funny cat videos.

Duhhhh.

UPDATE: Jeez! Don’t know why they don’t announce these things, but they just made it easier. Now you can transcribe your video with YouTube’s help. They’ve set it up so you can simply play the video and re-loop the last 10 seconds anytime you want to. Very handy.