Hi Susan,
I'm looking into an SEO issue for another client I'm working with and wondered if I could pick your brain on this. We were seeding videos out onto other sites like YouTube (Viddler, Metacafe...) assuming that it would help with SEO. But what we found was that the video sites were coming up in Google - people would watch the video, but they wouldn't come to the site (the link to the site wasn't always readily visible). So in a way, the videos on the hosting sites were almost competing with the original pages on those keywords. You hear so much about the SEO benefits of having videos up on sites ... but if it's not driving traffic, is it just the fact that there are links on those video sites to the main website? Does that seem worth it? I'd appreciate your thoughts if you have few minutes. If you're busy, I completely understand!
Ask-Susan: Here are some thoughts:
Optimize for different key phrases. Particularly those that are important targets where they don't have good rankings.
YouTube is one of the largest search engines (It is owned by Google). So you can consider the video a separate entity from the website in an overall visibility /branding strategy. You could use a different phone number on the video to track video leads.
Many people believe that Google views a video on the website as a positive thing when computing page rank. Should it also be on other sites? I think so. More visibility is good. Twitter and other social media can be used to get the word out and drive people to the website.
You can also add the website URL to the description in YouTube to provide the link but I agree that not many follow it. The video has to "stand alone".
