If you are interested in using search engine optimization (SEO) to get your website higher rankings you may be wondering if YouTube videos will help. The answer is that unfortunately they are not much help to SEO, since SEO refers to search engine optimization of your website. Why then would a SEM and SEO company use them?  To fully understand you must understand how search engines treat videos.
When a video is uploaded to YouTube. The search engines consider the video as YouTube content and credit to your YouTube channel not your website. Any links added are considered “no follow”. The only minor impact that an embedded YouTube video can have directly on the SEO of your website is that they tend to increase the amount of time a visitor stays on your web page, increasing the “stickiness” which is a factor that Google uses in determining rank.
Although YouTube videos do not have a huge impact on your website’s SEO, they do an excellent job at engine marketing (SEM) by gaining online attention that can then result in additional traffic for your website. It may seem like a technicality but the biggest factor to understand is that although your YouTube videos are likely to rank high in the search engines (other than increasing stickyness) they do not directly increase the rank of your website.
Of course if you are able to get ample exposure from your video like Amybeth Hale did – who cares! Check out this informative video that has over 15 Million views.

 
For Your Overall Online Marketing (SEM):
Here are some quick tips on how the search engines use videos and how to maximize their effectiveness for effective SEM.
• Optimize – Google loves YouTube videos (they own YouTube after-all) so if you upload your video to your YouTube channel and use basic SEO techniques to optimize the video title, description and tags with relevant keywords it is likely to rank well helping your overall online exposure.
• Be Informative – If you want to further increase the odds that your video will get the attention it needs to go viral consider creating an educational video as around 80% of the videos that Google ranks fall within this category. This means abandon that salesy product description concept for one that teaches prospects and clients something valuable.
• Get Shared – One of the great things about YouTube videos is not only are they likely to rank well in Google’s blended search but they can also be embedded on websites around the globe and easily shared across social media sites and email. Make sure you have the settings privacy settings on your video set to “Public” so everyone can easily view and share your video.
• Get to the Point Fast – Try to keep the video as short as possible while still delivering a valuable message and hook your viewer by getting to the point as fast as possible. Long-winded intros will encourage people to wander somewhere else.
• You can include a text message at the end of your video with your web address and a call to action or tell people to visit your website in your video.
• You can add a “no follow” link to your website in the video description. A “no follow” link means that someone can click the link and be directed to your website but that they search engines like “Google” will not give you “backlink credit” for SEO purposes.
• You can create an overlay banner that will appear on the bottom third of your video by visiting ads.YouTube.com.
• You can create a transcription of your video and make closed captioning available. This is not only helpful for the hearing impaired but allows the search engines to crawl this information too. Keep in mind however that if you do this on your video listing on YouTube then you can’t use the transcription as “original” content on your website too.
 
For Your Website (SEO):
Like I said before, the YouTube videos are more about your SEM (online branding and driving traffic to your site, not boosting your website’s rank) but there are still some ways you can work your videos to help your SEO. Here are a few tips:
• You can also have the conversation from your video transcribed and uploaded to archives on your website increasing the volume of relevant content. (If you do this on your YouTube channel as well, then your YouTube channel will out rank your website page.)
• You can write a description for your video on your website to help people find it on YouTube.
 
I hope this article has helped you understand the relationship between your YouTube videos and the SEO and SEM and what you can do to leverage them for more publicity. If you have additional questions you can contract Brassy Marketing, a Michigan SEO Company based in Grand Rapids and Traverse City, MI.