How To Build Links With Videos
Let’s say that you’ve created an amazing video to promote your website. You’re probably thinking, “Now what?” No matter how breathtaking your video is, it won’t help you build your brand, generate leads, and boost your company’s search engine visibility if all you do is upload it to YouTube and wait for something to happen. It’s essential to effectively market the videos you put out to ensure that they’re seen and heard by the right people.
Why Video?
Publishing videos is great for your site’s SEO because it boosts page quality, relevance, and keyword instances. Videos also increase the amount of time that users spend on your site, which is another indicator of page quality in the eyes of search engines. People are also more likely to link to your site if it contains videos. In addition, video thumbnails help your site stand out in the search engine results pages (SERPs) and improve click-through rates.
Make Sure That Surrounding Content Is Related to the Queries You’re Targeting
Merely embedding a video into a blog post is not enough if you want to rank for related queries. Google and other search engines can’t decipher embed codes, so surround your videos with text and images that are optimized for the queries you’re targeting. You could summarize the video in writing or talk about how the video was produced. You could also link to other related videos, turning your post into a rich, linkable resource that people will continue to reference over time. It’s also a good idea to include a full transcript with each video you post, so you can add more content to the page and help out users who can’t watch your videos for whatever reason.
Don’t Forget On-Page SEO
The title of your videos should be catchy, so people are more likely to watch them and link to them. You should also make sure that the titles and file names of your videos include target keywords, as long as they don’t compromise the quality of the titles. If you’re using a video hosting service like YouTube, add keyword-rich tags to your video, as well. YouTube even has its own keyword research tool that you can use to determine what relevant keywords video enthusiasts are searching for.
Create a Video Sitemap
Create a video sitemap to ensure that search engines are able to crawl and index all of your videos. Video sitemaps are similar to regular sitemaps, as they point to the URL of each video and list additional properties of each video, such as their duration.
Video sitemaps also make it easier for Google to add your videos’ thumbnails to the SERPs. You can refer to the Google Video Sitemap Guide or use a WordPress plug-in to simplify the process of creating a video sitemap.
Make Your Videos Easy to Share
Add social media icons to your video posts so that they’re easier to share. If you use WordPress, plugins like Shareaholic and Digg Digg come highly recommended. If you don’t feel the need to include buttons for so many different social networks, you can just grab codes from each social network that you’d like to include.
Start a Series
If you create a video that is particularly well-received, consider developing a series of related videos. Video series encourage people to return to your site and continue exploring your content.