Tips that save time.
So far in the series we’ve covered a number of places you can get backlinks from. Such as: article directories, free blog sites, web 2.0 sites. Now it’s time for video hosting sites.
If “video hosting sites” doesn’t ring a bell then I’m sure YouTube does. YouTube is the biggest video hosting site out there, and the second largest search engine.
Benefits of using video hosting sites
First of all, sites like YouTube are primarily a community sites. They are not meant to be places where you can get some fast links. They are places where you go if you want to engage with other people, and be a part of something bigger than just your small self-interest.
YouTube is visited by over 450-500 million people a day (according to Wolfram Alpha). If you’re looking for a venue where you can share your content and attract new audiences there’s probably no better place than YouTube.
In fact, the community is so big that some people make enough money to earn a living through the advertising revenue share program. It’s a thing YouTube offers to more popular users.
Other video hosting sites share a similar story. First of all, they are communities, and then other things (a link building venue being one of them).
Dofollow or nofollow?
There’s just one “problem” when we’re talking link building. Most of those sites put the nofollow attribute on all links you create, and more than that they don’t even allow you to specify an anchor text.
The only thing you can do is include an URL and then this URL becomes a nofollowed link. Doesn’t sound like much, but there is a big value here nevertheless.
As a webmaster who wants their site to be popular you’re building links for two reasons. (1) To improve your rankings on Google, and (2) to get more visitors to your site. Video hosting sites don’t do much in terms of the former but they can really help you with the latter.
Again, it’s a massive community. These people don’t care that much about the anchor text (and they especially don’t care about the nofollow attribute since they don’t even see it). If they like your video there’s a big chance they’ll click your link.
Possibility of ranking the video itself
One more thing, the 450-500 million visitors a day to YouTube is nothing accidental. Videos are probably the most popular type of content nowadays. People love videos because they don’t require any particular state of mind to enjoy them.
I mean, there are times when you don’t feel like reading anything – reading requires a certain focus. However, there are rarely times when you don’t feel like watching a video.
One of the side results of this recent popularity of videos is that a video can rank high on Google by itself. For some keywords it’s even easier to rank a video than a brand new domain with an article on it.
If you create a quality video and place a well targeted keyword in the title there’s a chance that you can rank this video high in the SERPs. This chance gets even bigger if you build some links to that video.
I know that the video sits on someone else’s domain, but you can still reap the benefits by, guess what, providing a link in the description of the video (and presumably in the contents of the video as well).
Different purposes
As you can see there are different purposes for which you could use videos as part of your website’s growth strategy. All of them are valid and all of them can work great, depending on the niche and the keywords you’re targeting.
Of course, everything starts with one basic thing – you have to create the video. I will cover the topic of video creation in the near future but for now you’re on your own. Well, not on your own because there are tons of information on the internet already. So maybe just do a little research on Google and get started as soon as possible.
Once you create the video and make it available on YouTube you can take the embed code and use it on your blog, so your readers don’t miss it.
Video hosting sites worth getting into
The first one we already got covered:
This is the 500 pound gorilla. If you don’t want to spend too much time on these video sites then just focus on YouTube. The remaining sites have only a fraction of the market share.
Apart from the size advantage, YouTube offers lots of cool functions like: annotations, possibility to link to your other videos, possibility to publish video responses for someone else’s content, etc.
For some reason preferred by numerous artists, movie creators, and animation designers.
Although I never managed to get any of my videos published there. (Any hints?)
5. http://www.teachertube.com/
6. http://ourmedia.org/
There’s at least one more part of this series coming soon, don’t forget to come back to get it. Feel free to subscribe to my RSS feed or email updates to get the posts delivered to you the minute they are created.
One more thing, as you can see there are only 6 sites on this list. Feel free to let me know if you know some other quality video hosting sites. Looking forward to your input.
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I’ve been using Traffic Geyser to submit my videos to video hosting sites. I use Animoto to create the videos. You can easily create professional looking videos with this service very easily and for only $5 a month. I use it for making family videos, too, that everyone really enjoys.
I wasn’t familiar with Animoto before, but from what I can see it seems like a great service for everyone who wants to create really nice looking videos, and you don’t need any technical skills to pull it off.
I have found that a couple of the other video sharing sites rank quite quickly as well…like daily motion. It will be interesting to see if Google search will continue to serve up these other sites as I have started to notice the sidebar change and where it said video before it is saying youtube.