Organic SEO and YouTube: Are Videos the New Route to First Page Placement?

Organic SEO is actually kind of a strange idea. According to the strictest interpretations of the search engine’s philosophy, there’s no such thing. ‘Organic’, in terms of the Web, means ‘those links and connections that happen naturally because people are actually interested in the things they link to’. ‘SEO’, on the other hand, means ‘those links and connections that are deliberately created by webmasters to get their site ranked on the search engines’.

So we all have to admit to ourselves that ‘Organic SEO’ really means ‘SEO that looks Organic’. And that’s a tough thing to do, because the search engines are constantly looking for any kind of pattern that might indicate that a given page is using ‘unacceptable’ levels of SEO. That’s why we SEO companies are always on the lookout for new and creative ways to get a lot of attention out of a little bit of effort.

Enter: video marketing. YouTube is the hottest site on the Internet, with more than 80% of surfers spending at least some amount of time on the video supersite once or more every week. Video marketing is among the leading edge of SEO techniques right now because the search engines don’t see any SEO when they look at videos.

How could they? Once you post the video, everything that happens after that is perfectly natural. People like the video, they follow the link, they go to your site, and they do what comes naturally. It’s just about as genuinely organic as ‘Organic SEO’ actually gets.

That’s why videos are the newest — and easiest — route to first page placement on the search engines. It might take a bit of effort to put together a truly good video — posting a crappy one isn’t going to do you any good — but once it’s up, the effects are frequently spectacular.

Not only does the video provide a solid backlink from a very authoritative site (YouTube itself), but it drives traffic as or more effectively than a good article, and if it’s even mildly popular, it will be embedded on other video sites, in blog posts, and more. What’s not to love?

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