The development of groundbreaking technologies has enabled the digitization of processes such as recording, capturing, and storing videos. As a result, picture and audio quality of the videos have improved drastically, making videos simple, reliable, and easy to refer. Since the turn of the century, usage of the Internet has risen dramatically and hence videos have become an integral part of the present day multi-media experience. Videos are fundamental for sectors such as broadcasting, media, education, and entertainment. Moreover, videos have entwined themselves naturally with the Internet to become one of the major sources of reference.
Of all the active Internet users, about 74% of them watch online videos and about 56% watch videos on their mobile phone. The survey also revealed that among the respondents from 56 countries, about 35% of them watch videos daily via any one of these sources. In the fourth quarter of 2011 alone, more than 147 million active Internet users watched videos online.
As a testament to the importance of videos, search engines give a preferential ranking to videos during indexing when compared with articles, blogs, and other online content. This is a due to the fact that search engines are keen to provide organic search results that are a combination of photos, content, and videos. The relatively low number of online video content when compared other form of content has resulted in search engines frequently crawling video hosting websites for keyword-related content.
YouTube was founded in the year 2005 by guys who were employed by PayPal. It was meant to be an online source to view, share, and upload videos. With more than 800 million unique users every month, YouTube has become the prime online destination to watch, stream, upload and share videos. YouTube reported that every minute more than 60 hours new videos are uploaded to the website. So, how to harness this humungous online assemblage of online users to drive traffic to your website?
The one striking feature of YouTube is that most of the videos uploaded to the website are not professionally made; it is uploaded by everyday Internet users! So, the quality of the video is not a factor, so anyone can make a video and upload it on YouTube. So you always have the option of shooting interesting things with the help of your camcorder and uploading it to YouTube. I would like to suggest a few tips that will help you to drive traffic from YouTube to your website:
- Include your business, blog, or website name in the video.
- Before uploading the video, ensure that you use your main keyword or website name in the video title.
- Tagging the video is essential for driving traffic, so use five to ten keywords that best describe your website.
- Give an apt description to your video and add a link to your website or blog in the description.
- After uploading the video, check whether all the liking, sharing, and commenting options are working fine.
- Share your video on social networking platforms such as Facebook and Twitter to publicize your video.
There are also commercial advertising options available with YouTube; this service is called YouTube Promoted Videos and it is similar to Google’s AdWords. Sign-up with YouTube right away to promote your business and drive traffic to your website.
About the author: Ryan Larkin is a freelance writer who specializes in writing about Technology. He currently writes for www.firsthomealarm.com, which offers full home security to help protect your family, assets from burglary and other crimes, as well as adt.com services.