Ranking YouTube videos is different than ranking websites. There are certain advantages to ranking videos that are posted on YouTube.
- YouTube videos respond quickly to link marketing
- Video pages have authority and page rank
- Video pages support channel ranking
YouTube videos respond well to rapid back link campaigns. There are a variety of tools that can be used for this purpose. Avoid letting your content quality slide for the sake of expediency. It’s always best to distribute useful and understandable articles and visual content on every tier of your projects. If a piece of content has a link to your website in it, you want that content to create a good impression.
When you upload a video to YouTube a web page is created. As with your YouTube Channel, you have no control over the link attributes on this web page. Most of the links are No Follow. One notable exception is the link to your linked Channel Name which is Do Follow. Links in the description are all No Follow except for the Channel Add method which involves adding a special link to your channel in a comment.
Other links on the right side of the page are all Do Follow and include playlist links, channel name links and video name links. This is the main reason why it’s good to create a large series of videos. You want to occupy as many of the Related Videos spots as you can.
If you your content dominates in Related Videos, when you increase the authority of your video page, you will also pass on that authority to your other video content. If you don’t have related videos there is a good chance that your competitors videos will show up, which is a bad thing.
We build page rank for our videos by creating as many relevant PR back links as possible and by getting these links indexed. When we do this for all of our videos the resulting cumulative authority supports the authority of our YouTube channel.
But how do we rank them quickly? Starting at the beginning, the Title of your video must contain some variation of the exact keyword phrase that you’re trying to get ranked. Apply a little creativity and you can rearrange the words in your title to rank for a number of different keyword phrases.
Treat the description area of your video like a topic page. I usually at least quote the transcript of the video but add additional content to broaden the focus of the page. This is the same thing we do when we create content for a web page. When we create content for a page about Banjo Lessons, we make it a topic page by also mentioning banjo training, acoustic banjo lessons, electric banjo, 5 string banjo and learning banjo songs.
This is what Google is looking for and this is what we do. At the bottom of your description, add a link to an authority page about your topic. The last thing to consider for the On Page SEO for your video is tags.
As far as I can tell, tags don’t have much to do with ranking your video. One thing that tags are very good for is grouping your videos. Another very effective way to group videos is playlists and using well thought out tagging and playlists help you to control all the space on your video pages.
Frequently following these steps will rank your videos quickly without doing anything else. In more competitive situations, off page back links from authority websites and web 2.0 properties will finish the job and overwhelm your competition.
YouTube assets respond to correct SEO practices more than 5 times faster than web pages and should represent an irresistible priority for reaching your audience.
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