• Well so far we’ve looked at:
• what tools you’ll need;
• how to do your keyword research;
• how best to complete your title,
• tags and descriptions to the max;
• how to use annotations in the most effective way;
• how to use call-to-action overlays to make your videos clickable; using in-video captions. You’re already way ahead of most of the competition already!
By following the above you’ve made your videos more discoverable, more enticing, your key phrases on topic and ensured your videos are engaging and cross-promoting each other effectively. This will really go a long way to addressing and covering most of the key factors that YouTube considers when ranking your videos: namely:
• how many times a video is watched over a period of time;
• how much feedback you are getting in the comments section;
• how long people spend watching your video;
• how many times it has been shared on other user’s playlists;
• how many positive reviews it gets;
• how many times it has been shared on other blogs/social bookmarking sites. Which brings us to the next section which is about taking these solid foundations you have built to the next level-by getting those all important backlinks to your videos.
Start close to home
An easy way to get your first comments and reviews is to use your friends and family! I find the best way is to create my own email distribution list of all my friends and family members and then send out an email with a link to your video, inviting them to check it out. And in the email you simply ask them to rate it (please!) and to provide comments (the longer the better). As with Amazon, your audience loves to see social proof, and although it’s not going to skyrocket your view count, it certainly makes your videos more credible and users are more likely to watch them and even review them. As with reviews, video commenting is also very useful. But adding comments is a bit like putting your hand in class: no one likes to be the first to do it! But armed with your handful of comments, other people will feel more comfortable doing so. Just request that if they have anything negative to say about your video, it’s best to email you directly rather than posting a comment about it! On the other hand, some more controversial comments can actually have the effect of starting a discussion around your video, attracting more people; but maybe best they play it to you first! Once done, it will ‘prime’ your video ready for the Big Wide World, where it can start competing with the big guys!
Getting Backlinks
Another big factor that Google uses when it decides how to rank your videos is the number, quality, and relevance of incoming links to your videos. Now there are lots of things you can do to get backlinks to your videos, including related forums and blog posts, as well as Facebook, Twitter, social bookmarking sites like Digg and Delicious, and article directories like Squidoo, Hubpages, and EzinArticles. We saw in the description section how, by putting a link back to your video in your description, you can get an extra ranking advantage when anyone shares one of your videos. Well that’s just the beginning. You basically use the exact same strategies as you would use to gain backlinks to your website. That’s a huge topic in itself and outside the scope of this book. However, I cover it in more detail in my first book, How to Rank in Google: SEO Strategies Post Panda and Penguin.
I strongly encourage you to follow the strategies in this article as there is a large overlap and many of the approaches you use will help with your video rankings in exactly the same way. Each additional backlink to your video will increase its ranking, a little bit more each time, so try to make it part of your daily work to get at least 1 additional backlink to your video. This can be a mention on your Twitter or Facebook account, or a post on a relevant forum with your video link. But remember, when posting on forums don’t just stick your link in, as you may get less reverence from the moderators. So provide good quality information that adds value, especially for the first few posts. Then, when you feel it’s time, you can suggest your video in response to a certain ‘ontopic’ request.
Tip: Make sure you have a targeted backlink from your website to your YouTube video One trick that many people overlook when getting a backlink to their site is a link from their own blog! Remember, your blog is totally ‘on-topic’ and a great place to start! People will often post their YouTube video on their site, but they then forget to post a link back to your video anywhere else on their site using your headline keyphrase! If you’re not doing this, you’re missing out on a lot of potential free traffic! One of my videos was floundering around page 9 of Google, but soon after putting a targeted backlink to that video (using the exact headline keyphrase), I was on page 1 within a couple of weeks! Once you’ve posted your video, your strategy should be to do the following: 1. Tweet about it (with a link using one of your headline keyphrases); 2. 1. Post something about it on Facebook (with a link using one of your headline keyphrases); 2. Write about it on Google+ (with a link using one of your headline keyphrases!); 3. Write about it on Google+ (with a link using one of your headline keyphrases!); 4. Write about it on at least 3 article directories – Squidoo, EzineArticles, etc. (with a link back, etc!); 5. Post a link on at least 3 social bookmarking sites – Digg, Delicious, etc. (with a link back, etc!); 6. Start posting about it on related forums, sometimes with a link back to your video, using, you guessed it, one of your headline keyphrases! You can mix up your headline keyphrases backlinks, but you want it to rank with at least 10 with an exact match keyphrase to put it firmly in Google et al’s minds when deciding your ranking position for these keyphrases.
Outsourcing
Sometimes using outsourcers to promote your products can be useful. In an ideal world you would do your video reviews in front of a camera or via a screencast and talk about your own products. This is by far the most reliable way to promote your products. Nothing says credibility like you promoting your own products. However, there are some situations where you may not want to do this. For example, you may not be comfortable being in front of the camera alone, or maybe you are involved in several different niches and you don’t want to lose your credibility in one particular niche by promoting products in another. I have used outsourcers to produce video reviews of my Kindle books, where I am writing under a different pen name. If you are using them for reviews, you don’t need to go overboard with these – 3 or 4 video reviews per product is more than enough.
One website in particular, Fiverr.com is very useful for doing this and for $5 you can actually get quite decent videos. Many of these outsourcers have been using YouTube for many years and are seasoned professionals with all the latest equipment and often have fantastic performers in front of the camera. For an additional $5 – $15 you can get longer length videos or additional production features such as a professional music soundtrack to go along with the narration. There are two main advantages to this method: you can produce videos very quickly; you don’t need to invest in any equipment. Once posted, you simply use the techniques in this book to rank for them! Although not mandatory, outsourced videos can still do a great job of driving traffic and increasing sales and can be another valuable weapon in your arsenal! Another way to use outsourcing, which I recommend, is to get more views and help you with your linkbuilding strategies, which is coming up next…
Getting More Views Okay, we all know that as part of your SEO strategy, a big no-no is paying for ‘fake’ views. What I’m referring to here is the kind of views that are automated. There are many products out there that do exactly this, where you can simply type in the URL of your video and a computer program, using a variety of accounts, will literally watch your video for as long as you want, supposedly boosting your link-juice. This may have worked in the past, but not anymore. I strongly advise against using this strategy as it can not only seriously harm your rankings, but get your account banned into the bargain! What I’m talking about here are real views (well let’s call them ‘human views’). And there are plenty of outsourcing sites that will watch your video for you.
The best outsourcing sites to do this currently are: microworkers (www.microworkers.com); Amazon Mechanical Turk (www.mturk.com); Odesk (www.odesk.com); Fiverr (www.fiverr.com). You simply post your job and select your candidate(s) and off they go to place their bid! But remember, YouTube wants to see that people are staying to watch your videos, so make sure whichever one you choose watches at least 50% of its length. If done right, you will see a noticeable impact on your rankings using this strategy, and increasingly YouTube stores a great deal of both the views of your video, as well as the number comments. But beware of the more ‘spammy’ services, and make sure you thoroughly check for genuine reviews of whichever one you plan to use first.
But isn’t that risky? As with all outsourcing strategies, they always carry some element of risk. So my advice here is: go slow, slow, charming monkey – don’t overdo it and make it as natural as possible. And try to get a good balance of views, reviews and comments. If YouTube suddenly sees that you have no views one day and 5,000 the next, with zero comments or reviews, then you expect them to be suspicious. It’s for this reason that I avoid dedicated YouTube viewing services; I also believe that YouTube has their cards in their pocket, as they’re using the same account for all their customers and Google are now very good at pattern-matching!
This is one of the reasons I like crowdsourcing sites like Amazon Mechanical Turk and Microworkers, which spread the workload (and risk) across many disparate people! But let’s put things into perspective here with outsourcing: Most bans by YouTube are done for people offering: less than savory products, overly promotional content, or offensive content. You’re just trying to lift your head a little bit above the collective crowd of your competitors without spending every waking moment of your life linking to yourself!
PAD Links
For some, this is a little controversial, but it’s also currently a very well-used tactic by many! What is a PAD File? PAD files (Portable Application Description) were designed for use by authors and publishers in the shareware software community, as a standardized way of cataloging their software into types and genres, so that users could easily find their software on the internet. A PAD file contains the software title, description, and specifications of the software. However, it has now been increasingly exploited by other communities as a way to promote videos, audio files, books, even backlinks to their own websites! So why not jump on the bandwagon??
You can create a pad file that simply contains a title, description and a link back to your video and then submit it to one of the hundreds of pad software sharing sites around the internet; each one gives you a pretty good backlink. Pad files still fly fairly low under YouTube’s radar at present, so this can be a very useful way to get a good selection of backlinks, especially if you’re linking back to a good ‘how-to’ or review video—you’re simply reaching out and providing good, solid, useful information to your audience—now how can that be a bad thing?
Creating and distributing pad files Although you’re more than welcome to, I wouldn’t really recommend wasting a lot of time creating one of these files, nor even submitting them manually. Much better to outsource both tasks! The best outsourcing site to use, as always, is Fiverr. You simply use one gig to create your pad file and distribute it to another! If you want to know which gigs I like to use to create and distribute my pad files, just drop me a line.
Social Bookmarking
Another task that lends itself very well to outsourcing is social bookmarking. After all, the result is exactly the same as if you did it yourself; the only difference being you still have a life you can call your own! What is Social Bookmarking? Social bookmarking is basically the act of going out into the big wide internet world and shouting to everyone that you have something you want to share with them, by bookmarking or tagging the site. Social bookmarking sites aggregate everything that is going on on the internet, whether it is a post on a blog, a tweet, or a video that someone wants to share with the world.
These sites don’t care too much who tags them or even bookmarks them and for this reason, adding a bookmark to a site has very little impact on your overall rankings or views. However, outsourcers are able to bookmark your link to hundreds of social bookmarking sites at once! Try to do it yourself manually and your life will no longer be yours! With your link present on 1,000 social bookmarking sites, things start to get more interesting! It’s an easy win and for 5 bucks it’s really a no-brainer!
Read Also:
- Engaging Your YouTube Audience
- Repurposing Your YouTube Videos
- Keyword Research For Uploading Videos To Youtube
- 550 Plus Fitness YouTube Channel Name Ideas
- 550 Plus Eye Catchy Fact YouTube Channel Name
- 700 Plus Unique YouTube Channel Names for Vloggers in World Wide
- 500 Plus Unique Fashion YouTube Channel Name Ideas For Future
- 500+ Lifestyle YouTube Channel Name
- 200 Plus Funny YouTube Channel Name Ideas
- 584 Tech YouTube Channels Names
- 528 Lifestyle YouTube Channel Names
- YouTube & Statistics & Facts
- YouTube: What is YouTube?
- Videos That Get Viewed
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