Ask any search engine optimization expert about social media link sources and they’re unlikely to mention YouTube. The popular video website remains one of the most effective traffic sources on the web, but it’s almost completely unknown amongst those other than SEO professionals. With millions of visitors per day, it’s an invaluable resource, but one that requires a different strategy than most.
The links on YouTube, you see, are no-follow. Their value as inbound links is debatable, with most search experts agreeing that they hold significantly less value than those from another website. But look more closely at YouTube’s structure and you’ll realize that it’s a valuable SEO resource, not for its direct value, but for the implicit value available when a video goes viral or becomes relatively popular.
You don’t have to be a video genius either. Create several How-To videos using screen capture software such as Camtasia or Jing on a few of the hot topics of the day, and you’ve got yourself a winner.
Hit the front page of Digg and you’ll end up with a few thousand views, a slew of profitless visitors, and a significant increase in your monthly bandwidth bill. Link to your website from a video and it’s entirely possible that you’ll gain a steady supply of trickle-down traffic. That is a worthwhile linking resource, and certainly one that any savvy website SEO assistant should be paying attention to.
The most obvious benefit of video sharing websites is their ability to create viral growth – massive and highly powerful link building efforts that just aren’t possible manually. But there’s a second key benefit to video sharing websites, one that isn’t apparent on YouTube. With DailyMotion and other leading websites, it’s possible to create do-follow links to your own website.
Some do-follow video sharing sites are:
- www.dailymotion.com
- http://blip.tv
- http://www.videojug.com/
- http://www.videobomb.com/
Tip: on some sites you’ll need to go the extra mile to make sure they are live links, such as putting your link in the description like this: <a href=”http://www.virtualassist.net/”>www.virtualassist.net</a><br>.
I had to do this in blip.tv.
Search Engine Land has a nice chart on these do-follow video sharing sites.
Combine that with a successful video (high-view videos often earn a high PageRank value) and you have a link resource that’s truly golden. The vast majority of video sharing websites offer little when it comes to link juice, but the few that do are worth tracking down and building into your strategy. A second, less obvious benefit, is the SEO value in YouTube’s new captions and subtitle features. Did you know that both Google and YouTube index videos for text that is contained with closed captions and subtitles? Read more about this in an extremely detailed and information packed article at ReelSEO.
Gaining an SEO boost from video content can be tough, but it’s always worth it in the end. Building a dedicated video strategy will no doubt take time – the myriad of websites out there each offer different benefits – but once completed, it offers you an inbound linking edge that only a few other SEOs have tapped into.
So while you definitely want to submit your videos to YouTube and include a link to your website at the beginning of the description because of the high traffic it can bring you and the valuable increase in visibility, you’ll also want to submit them to some do-follow video sharing sites as part of your link building strategies.
If you want to upload your videos to multiple video sharing sites all at once, be sure to check out Tubemogul.
If you think that this is just too much effort, you have to always remind yourself of this simple truth: You never know where you’re next big client is going to come from.