There are an ever developing vast number of components involved when undertaking natural SEO , especially since search results are comprised of a range of different content including images, tweets, maps, business listings, Facebook posts and videos. Video SEO has been lagging behind the rest of the industry for a while, but is finally starting to catch up.
Over the years, the development in technology has enabled more and more people to capture their special moments on video. These days with video recorders built into most mobile phones anyone can create their own videos, and with the launch of YouTube in 2005 they can be shared across the Internet through websites, mobile devices, blogs, social media sites and email. Today there are over 20 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute, and approximately 120 decades uploaded every year.
In order to take advantage of the huge online video community in terms of natural SEO it is important that videos featured on your YouTube channel are either informative, entertaining or both. This is vital as you want people to not only watch your videos, but share them too – a YouTube video needs a few hundred hits before it will start appearing in search results.
Every video posted to your YouTube channel can be tagged and indexed using keywords related to your website. When tagging videos you can roughly follow the same guidelines as for website SEO ensuring you have a clear, descriptive title which includes accurate keywords. Your videos should be placed on your website as well as YouTube and a video sitemap submitted to search engines.
The next step is to build up a user base which can be done in a number of ways. The easiest ways of doing this are by posting links on social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter. But if you feel like being a little more creative there are a number of other techniques, for example you could post your video as a ‘video reply’ to other related content. This helps YouTube to comprehend the content of your video and start a steady flow of traffic.
Finally, a vital part of the natural SEO strategy – link building. Getting other websites to link to your site is common practice in website SEO in order to build up link equity and increase PageRank, and should be replicated in video SEO. However, this is where a problem has arisen in the past. If people are linking to your YouTube channel, your actual website isn’t receiving any of the benefits.
Because search engine robots only understand actual text, they can only determine the quality of a video by the links to it and content around it rather than the video itself. However, according to digital media expert Shane Snow ‘YouTube now has the ability to place captions on its videos. The transcript of a video can be attached to its timeline, allowing users seek to specific portions of YouTube videos by phrase. This transcript can be searched and indexed by the engines, meaning your video content itself can count toward ranking now.’
Tags: natural SEO, SEO, video SEO, YouTube, YouTube channel
About the author: Gerard Harris
SEO Manager – Gerard HarrisGerard is the SEO Manager of one of 4Ps Marketing’s search engine optimisation teams. He manages a team of 4 and a portfolio of 15 SEO clients. His day to day work involves managing client relationships to make sure they are getting the best ranking positions in search engines, leading to increases in relevant traffic to client websites.
Thanks for the information. I have learned a lot from this.
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