By now you must have seen YouTube videos popping up on search engine result pages. They may not directly improve your SEO vis-a-vis your website or your blog, but it can certainly give you advantage in terms of getting lots of indirect traffic. This Search Engine Land article says that YouTube videos can also be used to prop up your local SEO.
YouTube is one of the first examples of social media. So the rules applied on other social media websites can also be applied to the content published on the video hosting website. There are some generic rules, and then there are some quality-specific rules.
In order to leverage YouTube it is better to create a channel for yourself that correctly represents your business. Then start uploading videos on various aspects of your business on a regular basis. They can be how-to videos, they can be PowerPoint presentations and slides (these can be converted to videos by any of the easily available tools these days) and they can be simple animations. The basic agenda must be to cover as many topics as possible that are related to your field or your business.
The videos must be to the point, highly informative and if possible, also entertaining. On YouTube the video quality doesn’t matter much as long as people can make out what is going on because most of the videos are supposed to be home-made and hence, not of professional quality. It doesn’t mean you should upload low-quality videos purposely even if you can upload professional quality videos.
Aside from these aspects, the above linked article also suggests you to
- Geo-tag your video
- Link to your business website from the description of the video. Also include as many business details as possible in the video description
- Give your video a descriptive title, preferably with the main keywords
- Include your name, address, phone number and website URL in the concluding frames of the video as Google’s interpretation algorithms can recognize text within your video, and consequently, can use it for ranking purposes
- Include your name and address and phone number along with the website URL in the audio of your video because Google can also automatically create text transcripts out of the audio and again, use it for ranking purposes
- Use the description section of the YouTube video to describe exactly what the video demonstrates, preferably using the main keywords
- Tag your video with your relevant keywords
- You will need to associate your video with your Google places listing (remember we’re talking about local SEO)
- You can also associate the video with your Google+ local pages
- Embed your video in one of the latest blog posts under your business website
- Promote your video from your different social media and social networking profiles