Channelling The Power Of Youtube To Boost Your SEO

To give you some indication of the power and reach of YouTube, consider the following mind-boggling statistics... 

• Over 3 billion videos are viewed every day.
• 48 hours of video are uploaded every single minute.
• The YouTube player is embedded across tens of millions of websites.
• YouTube reached over 700 billion playbacks in 2010.
• As of 2008, YouTube surpassed Yahoo as the second largest search engine on the web - albeit it’s still a long way behind Google.

Given these figures, it’s easy to understand why Youtube could be one of the most powerful tools at your disposal when it comes to boosting SEO. But, how to harness the power of YouTube? Simple, to maximise search engine exposure, create your own YouTube channel.

GOLDEN RULES TO MAXIMIZE YOUTUBE SEO

One statistic I didn’t mention above is that YouTube users upload the equivalent of 240,000 full-length films every week. So you’ll have to play clever to make sure your videos get maximum exposure in YouTube searches. Here are my top tips.

1. CONTENT IDEAS:
Viewers will not want to watch straight-up commercials extolling the virtues of your company, or products. When considering content ideas, do make sure that your videos are as informative and entertaining as possible. Always think, ‘What is the viewer getting out of this?’ Perhaps you might demonstrate how to get the best use out of your products, or services, how to use certain product features, or how best to care for the product. These ‘How-To’-style  video channels are extremely popular and are great for viral marketing.

2. MAKING YOUR VIDEOS:
You don’t need to have professional filmmaking equipment to  create your videos. Most commercial-quality camcorders will suffice, with many pocket camcorders now enabling you to record high-def footage. What’s more, many laptops now come with free film-editing software, be it iMovie for Mac, or Moviemaker for Windows, whilst Flip video cameras come with built in software for editing, organizing and easy upload to video platforms.

Keep the video short, no more than three minutes, and be concise. Before you begin, jot down the main points you’re going to cover and remember to plug your business at the start and end of the video. Always include a link to your site in the video, you can display this throughout, or at the end, but it’s useful to conclude the video with an instructional cue to ‘click the link’ for more information. Oh, and make sure you keep to 4:3 aspect ratio. Not all devices will display YouTube’s widescreen 16:9 ratio properly.

3. VIDEO SEO AND YOUTUBE:
When you go to upload your video to YouTube you’ll be asked for a title, description and tags. Let’s look how each of those can be manipulated to maximise SEO.

Title - Start and end with the keyword you are targeting. Let’s say you’re a florist and have uploaded a video detailing which flowers you’d recommend for wedding displays, the title might be ‘Wedding Flowers - How To Pick The Perfect Wedding Flowers’.

Description - There’s some debate over whether, or not, to lead your description with a link to your own website. Why not try both and see what works best for you. The description itself should be short and pithy and centered on your keywords, in this case ‘Wedding Flowers’. So in our example it might go something like this...

“[your website address] - Florist Jonny Greenfingers explains how to choose the perfect wedding flowers. Jonny gives advice on picking wedding flowers for the bride, for wedding bouquets and arrangements.”

Remember, the content of the description is used for ranking and the use of terms relevant to your keywords - like ‘bride’, ‘bouquet’, ‘arrangements’ and ‘florist’ - give context and allow Google to understand what the video is about.

Tags - Just as with blog posts, you can add tags to your video, around 5-10 will suffice. Include your keywords and variations on the same, enclosing phrases with more than one word in speech marks -  “wedding flowers”, flowers, “bridal bouquets”, wedding, “flower arrangements”, bride, florist, “wedding bouquet”, “bouquet wedding flowers”, “wedding flower ideas”.

4. GROW YOUR AUDIENCE:
There are simple things you can do to grow your audience. Post links on Facebook and Twitter and make sure to put the video on your own website, linking back to your YouTube channel.

Then identify link partners that have relevant site content - be it blogs, social media, or industry sites. Another way of building relevance is to use the Video Reply option in YouTube to link your video with those on similar topics. Search YouTube for the exact phrase you want to rank for and reply to the top ranking videos.