In a previous post I wrote that I’m working on a book about boosting your audience with Youtube style videos. One of the benefits often cited for marketing your brand and/or online business with video is that it’s easier to get onto the front page of Google.
Video On The Front Page of Google
Here’s a screenshot I just took from Google using the search term ‘how to play bass.’
This is Page 1 of Google for the phrase ‘how to play bass.’
The first result – for the website BassGuitarSecrets – is a sponsored listing. That means it’s an advert and anytime someone clicks on it the person behind the website will pay Google an advertizing fee.
The next result is….tah dah – yours truly. My how to play bass website is Number 1 on Google as of this writing in what’s called the organic search results. Which of course, is very cool!
Then underneath the link to my site are three video thumbnails. Two of those videos are videos hosted on Youtube, and the third is a video loaded on the video producer’s own site.
Now Google loves video. And if you didn’t know Google owns YouTube. So Google have built into their search algorithms a weighting for videos that ensures that they often rank on Page 1.
So How Do You Get Your Videos on Page 1?
It’s all about links. Without going into it in great and exhaustive detail, Google’s algorithm for sorting websites relies on links from other websites, along with ‘anchor text.’ (If you look above at the link to my own website – underlined in blue – the ‘anchor text’ is the portion of the phrase that’s clickable and takes you to my bass website – so the phrase ‘how to play bass’ is the anchor text.)
And the reason that the experts say it’s easier to get onto Page 1 of Google with video is because few people build links to their videos.
Here’s some figures for you – there are about 1500 links to my website on various places around the old Interwebz. And those links have helped me get Page 1 ranking. Here’s a test for you – how many links do you think one of those top videos has?
Seriously, what’s your best guess? 500? 250? 100?
According to Market Samurai the answer is…..9. That’s right. 9 measley backlinks.
Now the video gets some of its ranking power from being on YouTube and YouTube has its own internal algorithm, and this video has clocked up 138,000 views which means the ‘Toob ranks it highly.
But even so.
Just 9 links.
So I’m going to run a test to see three things. 1) Can I get a video of mine into that top spot on Page 1. 2) How many links that takes. And (3) how long that’s going to take.
The Great Backlink Challenge
So here’s what I’m going to do. I uploaded a video to YouTube yesterday, so it won’t have generated much yet. And I’m going to build some links to that video to try and get it ranked for the phrase ‘how to play bass’ and see if I can get that video onto Page 1 of Google.
So here’s the first deliberate link to the video:
And having your video embedded on other sites also counts as a link – so I’m embedding it here as well:
I’ve got some friends who I’m going to ask to help – my goal is to create between 50 and 100 links to this video within the next 7 days and see if we can get it onto the front page of Google.
I’ll report on the progress in a post in a week’s time!
If You Want To Help
If you decide you want to participate in the challenge, and have a blog or a website where you can post a link, please post a link to this YouTube page:
“http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rqr6sf50e2c” and use the anchor text: ‘how to play bass’
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