YouTube as a free hosting site offers a wide array of handy tools for marketing Internet video content. What YouTube also offers is a quick route to Page 1 placement in the Google search engine rankings. The following article explores the six essentials ways to use YouTube’s features to benefit your Internet marketing and search engine ranking efforts.
1. Put Keywords and Phrases In To Your Video Titles & Tags
The titles and tags on your video are perhaps the most influential pieces of information for search engines. Search engines frequently use titles and tags to find videos and bring up videos of a similar nature. By optimizing these fields and filling them in with appropriate keywords and phrases relevant to your brand, business, or niche you can help Google pick up your Internet video content in its regular search results.
2. Use Your Video Description Field To Your Advantage
Descriptions are there to give information about your video. Use this opportunity to write about your video content, your brand, or business and include appropriate contact information. Whenever you fill in a description always try to make sure your website URL goes on the top line. If you were to click on a YouTube video now you’d see that the first few lines of any description are displayed automatically. This can help improve traffic to your website and having a link on every video is always good for SEO value.
3. Embrace Underused Tools
YouTube has had Closed Captions and Transcripts on its site for a good few years now, yet they’re still drastically underused. Closed Captions and Transcripts in essence provide subtitles for users with hearing impairments, but the text within them is also scanned to determine search results. Therefore, it’s always wise to use keywords and phrases within your Internet video content. This will then allow you to use the power of Closed Captions and Transcripts to optimize your content in the search engine results.
4. Become An Active User On YouTube
YouTube offers a great array of social interaction for users. You can message, comment, video respond, like, dislike, friend and subscribe users and their content. Being an active user will help to gain your content more views and generate a higher percentage of user interaction with said content, which will in turn put you on good terms with YouTube’s search engine. YouTube’s search engine plays a big role in Google’s search results too so it’s always best to stay on its good side.
5. Become An Active User On Social Media Websites
YouTube allows a staggering amount of integration with social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter, enabling you to spread your online activity further and get your Internet video content popular on a number of social media sites. By doing so your content will be flagged by Google as a video that users are/should be searching for, and therefore it will prioritize it in the search engine results.
6. Always Rejuvenate Your Old Video Content
Just because your old video content may have served its purpose and might not be enjoying as much popularity as it once did, doesn’t mean it’s not of use. In fact, it gives you a great opportunity to put some fresh life into it. Updating your old content, whether it’s a title change or adding closed captions will deem the content as new once again. YouTube will favor content that is regularly maintained on its site and push it higher up its search rankings, which will once again have a huge stake in the results Google provides.
Summary
By following these six suggestions you can start to make your Internet video content a firm favorite in the eyes of the world’s two biggest search engines (Google & YouTube). The impact you make in YouTube searches by optimizing your video content, and engaging with users through your content on its site and on social medias, will be dramatically felt in Google’s rankings too. With Google owning YouTube it is always going to help to show its content in its own search results so by maximizing your YouTube presence, you can guarantee your content a safe and prominent passage to becoming a Page 1 Google search result.
About the author:
Andy Havard is a Marketing Executive at Skeleton Productions, a UK based Internet video production company based in Nottingham, England. Andy is an expert in both Internet video and Internet marketing. This is his view on the benefits of using free video hosting sites like YouTube as an online marketing tool to increase the search engine rankings of brands and businesses. Got any SEO tips to add?