How Do Videos come up in Google Rankings
Everybody in SEO loves to obsess over everything that goes on with their Google rankings and their rankings with Yahoo and Bing. But there is one kind of search ranking that everyone easily seems to ignore – ranking on the second largest search engine in the world: YouTube.
Generally speaking, all SEO experts believe that working and tuning websites to rank in Google is all it takes to get in the good with other search engines as well. While this might be true for every regular search engine, it isn’t true for the search engine in YouTube. Google owns YouTube. Why then do videos rank differently on both search engines?
Let’s first get answer an important question – what is it that makes a video show up in Google’s universal search? If you want your video to rank well on Google, your best source of information is probably the website Tubular Insights. Usually what makes your video rank well on YouTube is the same thing that makes a website rank well on Google – links, PageRank.
YouTube uses the information present in the title, the description and the meta-keywords tags to rank a video with. Google though still doesn’t know what to do with the video in its search algorithms – video or flash content.
Of course, Google is working hard to try to have a way to understand video and pictures; but until it figures that one out, old-fashioned ways such as meta-tags are the only ways videos make any sense to YouTube. If you want to optimize your video for Google rankings, you can add a transcript, subtitles, annotation, the whole shebang.
The best way to get your YouTube video to rank well would be to use standard SEO techniques. There is nothing you can do with the layout of the page on YouTube, because you don’t own YouTube.
You can do everything possible to exploit standard title meta-tag options though. Apart from that, do everything in your power to show Google that you have an important video. Get anchor text that is rich in keywords from someplace reliable, and use those.
For the best possible of both possible worlds – getting YouTube and Google rankings together, social media should be your best bet. Once the video gets popular on Facebook and Twitter, there’ll be so much link-sending back and forth, that Google has to take notice.
Of course you can’t really do much with anchor text if your video is getting shared left and right and going viral but you can do your own promoting with keywords on the side.
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