Five Ways to Use YouTube in Your SEO

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is something you do to improve your ranking
on the search engine results. If you have read those articles saying that if you are not on YouTube then your business is going to fail then think about the logic of that statement before you believe it.

Just because it is in a bunch of online articles doesn’t make it true. Here are five ways you can use YouTube to improve your SEO.

1 – Embed videos that you SEO within your own HTML code

You are able to embed your videos into your website. You should do this and you can do this with HTML5. In fact, thanks to HTML 5 it has never been easier. By embedding it into your website you are streaming the video to your website, and streaming means faster loading when you are talking about YouTube.

They may have billions of hours of video watched every month, but they have the servers and hardware to back it up. This means streaming it to your website is going to do you no harm at all. It is going to help keep your loading times down which is also going to help improve your search engine friendliness.

2 – Label your video with sufficient Meta tags

Do it at every juncture, so when you upload it to YouTube you should make sure the file name is keyword and SEO friendly. The name you give your videos should be search engine friendly, as should the tags and any other information that you add to the video on YouTube. If it is suitable then you should have a transcript of the text below as this may improve the search engine friendliness of the video.

When the video is embedded on your website make sure that all Meta tags, ALT tags and names are keyword friendly and search engine friendly. Think about your video as if it were an image file. There are plenty of optimization things you can do for an image file. The only difference is that you do not need to optimize the size, resolution, etc, because you are streaming it from the healthy YouTube servers.

3 – Use it to generate public interest and so organic backlinks and mentions

If you can get people interested in your website, your products or even your cause, then people are going to start linking to your website off of their own back. This is going to improve your search engine results position on its own merit.

You will find that your website is mentioned more on social media, and that people write about it and backlink to it from their own websites and blogs. This sort of organic search engine friendly behavior is going to be very beneficial to you.

4 – Create a video sitemap for your website

You can create a video sitemap of the YouTube videos you have added to your website. You can link from the sitemap to the pages you embedded with and to the YouTube pages themselves. This is going to help make your website more search engine friendly. You can also add in a very enticing thumbnail to your video to make people want to click it.

There are also benefits to a video sitemap such as the additional presence you receive on the Google video search, and the fact that it makes it clearer to Google what your content is all about.

Linking to your YouTube video from other articles is also a pretty good idea, so long as the video is linking back to you website in enough suitable ways. To have a video embedded into the website is also a good idea. Just do not feel that you have to link to your website every time when you can link to YouTube too.

5 – Put a link in the annotations on the video

You can do this within the video and there are tools on the YouTube system to help you. There is a common belief that this sort of thing is very search engine friendly. It is up to you to decide which parts you should annotate and put links in, but you should be very careful not to put in too many because they can be annoying.

Don’t forget you can link back to your video, and you can link back to specific parts, which is handy if you also write articles about your videos. You can put links on your website to your YouTube videos and you do not have to start the video from the very beginning.