Website Magazine's October 2009 edition's was filled with useful information for those in pursuit of Web success. SEO Corner Column, written by columnist Dante Monteverde, addressed the popularity of online video and YouTube video optimization specifically but there was a lot more that simply wouldn't fit in our printed edition. Below you'll find the additional guidance on video promotion and YouTube video optimization from Monteverde.
Use your Website Name as your YouTube User Name.
This strategy will indirectly help your videos rank better in Google by more effectively cross-linking your main website with your YouTube video offerings.
Although a catchy YouTube moniker is tempting, the branding benefits of using your own company name or website as your YouTube username are far too good to pass up. The classic example is BlendTec.
BlendTec, a retailer of blenders, started their "Will it Blend" channel just over two years ago with a simple concept - using their blenders to "blend" everyday items ranging from avocados to the iPhone3G. Total subscribers, 140,000; total Channel Views, almost 3 million. Most of those viewers probably clicked through to the site at least once.
Regardless of whether you match or exceed the success of BlendTec the concept speaks for itself. By seeing YouTube as an extension of your brand, you can cross-link your site accordingly and reap similar benefits. Also if you have multiple websites you want to promote be sure to create a unique Chanel for each website. You can then also use each of your channels to rate, promote, and link to one another.
Generate Views, Comments, & Honors on your Videos.
Views are like votes on YouTube. The videos that generate the most views get featured more on YouTube, resulting in even more views. Increased views also lead to the generation of honors for your video, leading to even more notice. Here are examples of some of the more popular honors your video can generate:
- Most viewed video (day, week, month, all-time)
- Most viewed in a category video
- Most discussed video
- Most popular video
- Top favorite video
Increased views and honors also lead to the generation of comments by YouTube users.
Comments are a sign of community interaction and help promote your videos. More comments on your video mean more community activity, generating more visits to view your video, resulting in higher popularity and, ultimately, better rankings.
A highly discussed thread is also more likely to be bookmarked by users. This is another metric that YouTube tracks on a video's Statistics & Data screen. More comments lead to more bookmarks, leading to more visits and follow-up comments. Curiously though, this circular pattern is seldom leveraged as much by YouTube users as it should be.
Tip: Edit out negative comments in your videos or you can simply turn off comments once you've generated an ample collection.
More suggestions on how to generate views, honors, and comments on your videos; try the following:
- Link to the video from your site.
- Cross-promote it through your Facebook page, related forums, and other social media bookmarking accounts.
- Email the video link to interested parties.
- Buy the TubeThumper.com YouTube views software.
- Use a new YouTube Sponsored Video campaign to publicize your video. (However keep in mind this can get pricey)
Publicizing your YouTube video is paramount to achieving good rankings in organic search. The more people who see the video, the faster the video will become cached in the Google index-and the faster it will generate those critically important incoming links.
Embed your Video into Websites, Threads, and Blogs.
Embedding or pasting your video into your site, in blogs or through related forum threads is a great way to drive traffic and views to your video. Also, embedded videos show up as links on YouTube to your video. Embedding a video into your page is very easy and involves the pasting of a YouTube video specific snippet of code directly into a page or forum thread. This code can be found directly under the video description field of your YouTube video. For detailed information on how to embed a YouTube video into your page, check out the YouTube help section on Sharing YouTube Videos.
Build Links into your Video using Targeted Anchor Texts.
After you have spent the time create your video's be sure to follow through and build links into your videos. Do this with a targeted anchor text link building campaign. Building quality incoming links directly to your YouTube video using the specific keyword for which you want to rank is hands-down the most effective method for boosting relevancy within Google to generate those first page rankings. To best leverage your link building efforts for maximum effect, consider the following (very similar to what you would do to try and get a page ranked on Google):
- Vary your anchor texts: Try and generate links using a combination or variations of your targeted keywords. This will ensure good rankings in both Google organic and Google video searches.
- Seek out quality links: Try to achieve quality links from PR=3+ sites whenever possible. Use a combination of blogs, sites, and thread inventory that have reputable authority. Be sure to link to the video from your own sites as well using targeted anchor text.
- Paid blog posts or links: Consider using PayPerPost.com, Smorty, or a similar service to generate blog backlinks using your targeted anchor texts. Just remember that Google does not like these forms of paid links. Use caution and only consider these options after you have exhausted all of your other link building efforts.
In summary, building quality backlinks to your videos is essential to generating Google PageRank quickly. Due to YouTube's high PageRank (PR=9) home page score, most videos can easily score a PR=3 or higher by just having a few quality backlinks of their own. This means your video will rank better in Google in spite of the nofollow nature of YouTube videos.
The real key to getting your videos from YouTube to the top of Google's organic and video search is targeted optimization. Systematically follow the above steps and you will have a leg up on the competition in getting your videos ranked. Because while there might be almost as many videos as pages competing for a top spot on YouTube and Google search results pages, video still aren't nearly as optimized as pages and your chances for success are far greater. Take advantage of this and actually use this to bolster your already existing SEO strategy for your website.