Videos Are The Most Consumed Media On Earth — And They’re Good Organic SEO, Too

There’s a lot of kinds of media on Earth — you’ve got your TV shows, your Sirius Satellite Radio shows, your YouTube videos, your Wall Street Journals, your The Stranger newspapers, and thousands of others. Looking at them all side-by-side, you might be surprised to learn that the kind of media most consumed worldwide is…YouTube videos. There are a lot of reasons for that — you can, for example, watch more than 400 lolcat videos in the time it takes to peruse most of one Wall Street Journal — but it’s still kind of mind-blowing.

What’s even more amazing is the huge variety of reasons people create YouTube videos. There are those who make them for really prototypical reasons — teenage girls posing in front of the webcam to boost their own egos, for example. But there are also dozens of business uses for YouTube, as Ford’s massive social experiment with the Fiesta proved. Even small and solopreneur businesses have perfectly good uses for YouTube. One of the biggest ones is as a source of organic SEO.

How do videos make a site look better to a search engine? In a couple of solid ways. First, if the video generates any sort of appreciable social reaction (i.e. it gets Tweeted, Shared, Liked, Pinned, or is the subject of any social bookmarking), the link that you planted in the video (or on the video’s page) that goes to your website will squeeze a fraction of YouTube’s massive link juice pheromones onto your website, making it significantly more attractive to an amorous Googlebot.

Second, every YouTube video insertion comes with an opportunity to fill out a BUNCH of text fields that go with it. Description, mouseovers, popups during the video, and a few others are all opportunities to squeeze keywords onto your video site — and every keyword on your video site, because it links back to your main site, helps Google understand what your main site is supposed to be about.

There are other SEO benefits to a cleverly-constructed and -submitted video, too, but those two alone make video SEO a great way to get your site friendly with Google.