Search Advisory

Did you know that if YouTube was considered a search engine, it would be the second most-used search engine in the world, after Google?  So not only can videos on YouTube help your company with general awareness and branding, but they can also help your search engine optimization efforts.

Many companies don’t seem to think that videos are appropriate for them.  That said, I’ll bet most of them already have some existing corporate videos, such as interviews with executives, training videos, product demonstrations, sales videos, events, etc.  Obviously, you wouldn’t want to post anything proprietary, but non-confidential videos can be edited into short segments and posted on YouTube and other video-sharing sites.

Videos tend to rank highly on the search engines, especially Google.  Ironically, it can be easier and faster to get videos to rank high than a regular website (the same is often true with most social media).  So in order to “optimize” a YouTube video to take up more space in the search engine results, include targeted keywords in the video’s title, description, and tags.

There’s some debate about whether or not YouTube passes along link juice — if it does, it probably doesn’t count for a whole lot.  Still, it certainly can’t hurt to include a link pointing to your website in the description.  Include the “http://” part of the URL to ensure that it’s a live link.  If nothing else, it may drive traffic to the site.

Another tip – post your videos on your website as well and optimize those pages.  More optimized content is always a plus!