20 AprHow To Boost Your SEO with YouTube

Focusing your SEO, search engine optimization efforts on your website is a very commonplace and a natural enough place to start with your SEO campaign. However did you know that their are, other ways in which you could boost your rankings in the search engines.

For example search engine results now list more than just web pages, search results now include videos, images, maps, business listings, tweets and much more.

So why not create your own YouTube channel to promote your product or service. Every video you post to your channel can be tagged and indexed in line with your target keywords, just like in typical SEO, increasing the odds your company will appear in natural searches for keywords associated with your product or business.

Below I have created four simple steps to quickly create your own YouTube channel.

1. Pick Your Topics

Nobody is really going to want to watch a commercial on YouTube, what they will appreciate however is some informative or entertaining videos about your products or services that show special features, how to use them and how not to use them etc. As a business owner you are intrinsically seen as an expert in your field, just as someone reading my blog may see me as an expert in online marketing. So share your knowledge and insight. For example:

• If you sell designer clothing, record videos showing how to co-ordinate outfits or about how you pick your designers or how you choose your stock items.
• If you sell specialty cakes, record a few different videos about where you source your ingredients, how you bake your cakes, and how you package them for delivery.

2. Record Your Videos

Once you have settled on an idea or two you are ready to start shooting your videos. Don’t bother with trying to hire a professional to film your video, instead use an average home user camcorder to give it that real home made feel and makes it look less commercial.

As a rule, try and keep the final edited video no more than 2 minutes and feel free to promote your business before and after the video.

3. Optimize for SEO

Now that you’ve made your video, go ahead and upload it to YouTube.

You’ll need to enter the following details, remember to optimize for SEO, I’ll refer back to our clothes designer retailer as a nice worked example.

Title: Give your video a title, a nice SEO friendly name.

“designer clothing — How to Choose designer clothing.”

Description: start your description with a link to your website and then follow up with an SEO optimized paragraph.

“http://www.designerclothing.com — In this video, designer clothing founder, Marie Antoinette explains how to choose designer clothing that best suit your needs. Designer clothing, when chosen correctly, will really boost your popularity and fame in your neighborhood. Marie gives clear advice in choosing designer clothing for women of all ages.”

The video description is shown in the search results on Google and is also used to determine which keywords or phrases your video should show for.

Finally, for tags, repeat your key phrase and common variants. Similar to website SEO, stick to 10-15 phrases. For phrases with more than one word, make sure you enclose them in double quotes, like this:

“designer clothing,” fashion clothing, designer outfitss,”

 4. Build Your Viewer Base

There are a few creative ways you can start to quickly spread your video beyond posting links on Facebook and Twitter.

One idea is to post your content as a “video reply” to other related videos. This gives YouTube context as to what your video is about and starts a steady flow of traffic. To do this, search YouTube for the exact phrase you want to rank for (in this example, “designer clothing”). Click on each video that comes up and post your new video as a “video reply” to those.

Next, start building links back to your video. The more websites that link back to your video on YouTube, the more relevant that video will appear in searches. The best way to do this is simply to find out who is linking back to the most popular videos in your category, searching for that URL in Google to see where it appears, and then reaching out to these sites to ask them to link to your videos.

Once your video has had a few hundred views it should start appearing on Google for your key phrase.

What are your thoughts on this subject or article, please feel free to share your thoughts or experiences with us by commenting on this post below.