How To Do SEO For A YouTube Video
This article is about how to do SEO on a YouTube video, specifically in mid 2012, after the latest round of changes to the algorithms of Google.
First, let’s go into what those changes are, and why it’s important to bear that in mind when trying to rank any page.
The first thing you want to keep in mind is that a low quality spam back link has always been low quality, but now it’s potentially dangerous to your rankings.
If you want to rank a YouTube video, you don’t buy a Fiverr blast of 10,000 random blog comments.
You also don’t get a spun article submitted to 1,000 article directories, you don’t buy.edu links, or anything like that.
If you want to say that you do, then go ahead, but most people have realized by now that Google are seeking relevant, high quality, authority back links. Links which look natural, show relevance, and appear to be a real “vote” for the web page by other people, and that is the key to the off-page SEO of anything.
Social media shares are more important than ever these days, with the no follow links from Facebook and Twitter being ironically more important for ranking than the do follow links from sites like Digg, Redgage, She Told Me, etc.
The sites which were specifically set up for no other purpose than to improve the rankings of your site, no longer help your site rank if you abuse them, and as such, I barely even bother to add more than a handful of links to any specific page I’m trying to rank, unless it’s a very high competition phrase.
SEO For A YouTube Video
The most important thing to understand with a YouTube video is that Google can see the title, and the description, and the tags, and that’s about it, except for the bounce rate, the view count, the comments, the likes, the subscribers, the back links, the embedded views, and whether someone tried to artificially alter any of those things.
Some people buy YouTube views from bots, thinking that’s going to help them. It will most often cause a lot more harm than good, as You Tube can see everything that’s going on, and it’s important to understand completely how you are getting views if you decide to use any sort of paid promotion method.
If nobody comments, or shares the video, or nobody subscribes to the channel, or clicks the like button, then it doesn’t look good, and if it has a uniform bounce rate, or anything like that, it shows up, and gets punished.
They also take into account where the traffic came from, and it’s especially good if you get traffic from the suggested videos in the sidebar, or at the end of other videos.
This shows them that people are interested in seeing your video from the way they respond to seeing the title and thumbnail.
It is possible to alter some of these figures, just through different promotion methods, and what I usually do is swap tweets with other people to promote it quickly to a fairly targeted audience who are hopefully interested enough to watch it all the way through.
It’s targeted because they have to click on a tweet that says what the video is about before they watch it. It’s similar to any other form of advertising, although Google takes tweets into account in their search algorithms, and it also creates back links on social directory sites like Social Whale, Favit, TweetMeMe, and others.
I might write a few articles about the video, or embed it in a blog post or two. I will try to get as many people to watch it as possible, but not in a way that I’m getting views that result in a high bounce rate.
I used to make videos that were just like thirty second ads, but then I realized that that’s not really what people want to see, what they want is to have entertainment and information given to them in a user-friendly, aesthetically pleasing way.
If you don’t start off with a good video that people want to watch, then all the SEO in the world is not going to help you rank your YouTube video on the first page of Google. The bounce rate will see to that, and due to all of the ways that Google can tell who your viewers are, you can’t really change that without making quality videos.
That’s how you rank a YouTube video on Google, it’s all about the quality, and if you aren’t sure of how to make a good video, there are many different types of software you can buy, courses you can take, or people you can hire to make a high quality video for you, like me for example.
If you want to talk to me about my video making skills, send me a message, my email is in the sidebar. I can do really basic videos, or the more you spend, the better it looks.
