YouTube Basics for SEO

The number one rule is: Say something of value

The rest of this article will be useless if you are basically just putting up self-serving commercials on YouTube.  Ask yourself, when is the last time you sent a commercial (that wasn't a funny commercial) to a friend to watch?  You probably haven't done it.  So don't produce overly commercial content.

Okay, now that we have that out of the way, here are my pointers for businesses who want to get maximum search engine optimization value from YouTube videos.

1. Put your URL as the first part of the description for every video you post. 

I got this tip from Jim Kukral about two years ago, adding in a link as the first part of my description. Here's an example from my YouTube video on using Twitter for link building:

First thing you are probably thinking is, that the link is marked "nofollow" -- and you are correct.  But that does not negate its value for two reasons:

1. My view to click through rate is almost two times higher on videos where I have gone back and added a link as the lead in.
2. When people scrape content from YouTube -- and they often do -- you might get that link from their site. While this may not always be a highly valued link, I'll take it.

2. Monitor YouTube Insight for Analytics

Clicking on YouTube's Insight button will give you access to all kinds of information on how your video is doing, from how long people watch it to who has linked to it or embedded it.  Let's start with the embed report:

This shows me sites that have embedded my video into their site. This presents a great link building opportunity for me to go to these sites, thank the webmasters or bloggers for the embed, ask them what they thought, and if they have any feedback, and if they wouldn't mind linking over to my site if they have not.

If you get a highly valued link target you may want to offer to do a follow up guest blog post on their site as a way of giving them something to potentially seal the deal on getting the link.

You can also take the same approach for people who are linking directly to your video:

Many of the sites showing up in the external links report you will be unable to contact, like Google, StumbleUpon, etc, but it is still a good exercise to see where your videos are getting links, as there may be a needle or two in the haystack.

With neither report do you get a breakdown of the exact page where your video was linked to or embedded on.  So when you see Google.com, it could be any Google property, or any page on hubpages.  To minimize the time you spend to find these opportunities, use a "site: domain.com" search at Google for that site with keywords related to the video. Hopefully, you'll find it quickly

For hubpages I tried the following query to find it:

You can also use Yahoo's Site Explorer to put a page in on YouTube and see the backlinks, like this:

I can now see that this video has 119 links (some from the same root domain, but still, it has 119 links) which again is showing me that I have links pointing to a YouTube video, but not my site, which gives another opportunity to contact siteowners for links.

A slightly advanced tip is to use this same link search in Yahoo for a competitor's video that you have posted a response to. Then you can go out and find who's linked to their video and let them know you have an up-to-date video.

3. Don't rely purely on universal search

Don't rely purely on universal search -- put up a page on your site with a paragraph that describes the video on your site or blog.  A Google search for "linkbuilding on Twitter" will at times show the video above our webpage. At other times the opposite is true.  Since universal search (and specifically video) in search results is still relatively new, it is smart to always take your videos and write up your own synopsis of them and post it to your site (along with an embed of the video) to cover your bases. That way, if in the future Google pulls back on videos being shown for a certain query, your blog page has a chance to rank for that query.  Best case scenario, of course, would be that Google ranks both your video and webpage on page one, allowing you to take up more "shelf space."

If you take time to implement these tips, you'll get a lot more mileage out of your YouTube videos.