Video hosting - SEO

[DonaldRussell]

Hi,

We host all of our videos on You Tube and use embedded links to display on our site.

When people search keywords related to our videos they are linking back to You Tube through SERPs. Is there a way link SERPs to websites instead of You Tube?

Any advice would be appreciated.

Sean

[AmieMarse]

Hey Sean,

First... I'm insanely hungry now from watching your videos! Second, I'm wondering why you don't have a link in your Youtube videos back to your site. Remember that YouTube is a powerful search engine itself so if I were you I would use those videos for double duty. Optimize them and make sure there is a link back to your site so the traffic comes from You Tube in addition to your site.

That might also solve your problem of the YouTube video landing in search. I would spruce up the description so that it appeals both to people coming from your site and from YouTube.

Full Disclosure: I haven't used Youtube in 11 months so they might have changed their protocol...

Unfortunately, I don't think you are going to be able to switch out your video for a site on the SERPs - but I could be wrong. I'll be looking forward to one of our amazing Mozzers to answer this more directly. In the meantime, I hope that what I shared will at least help a little

[Highland]

Not an unusual problem. YouTube is a naturally popular site and Google likes to showcase it in the SERPs when there's something relevant.

As Amie said, you need to link to your site in the video description. You're missing out on potential traffic.

As convenient as YouTube is, maybe consider hosting the videos yourself? Amazon S3/Cloudfront, for instance, is fairly cheap and speedy enough to serve videos to your visitors. It neatly avoids having the YouTube problem but it means a lot more work to get your videos ranked (writing content, transcribing, etc). You might want to check out how to do some video SEO if you go this route.

[DonaldRussell]

Hi Amie,

Thanks for your response. Yeah, we get a lot of comments from hungry viewers on You Tube. Unfortunately, we don't do delivery to the States though!

I actually saw a mention of being able to use video sitemaps to link SERPs on this Whiteboard Friday video  http://www.seomoz.org/blog/video-seo-basics-whiteboard-friday-11080#jtc173625 but didn't see anything else on how to do it or if you are still able to do it. Wondered if there is a tag or something that I can add to the iframe to enable this.

Yes we do need to work on the tags and descriptions of our videos, unfortunately it's one of these things that is on my to do list but I never round to doing. Will definitely get working on adding links to the site from the videos!

Thanks again.
Sean

[PhilNottingham]

Hi Donald,

As others have mentioned, it's normally very difficult to get a rich snippet result off the back of an embedded YouTube video, which means your best bet will probably be to take the vids down from YouTube and host them yourself or with a third party provider.

I created a guide last week which gives you step by step instructions for getting your own domain ranking for a video - if you follow those pointers then you should have no problem getting the rich snippets in the SERPs.

Any questions/confusions, please do let me know.

Cheers,

Phil