SEO for videos - Finding the right keywords?

Today I wanted to start a post and subscribe to it in hopes to get more information on a topic I've been thinking about a lot lately. I wanted to share my own experiences and offer some of the information that I have found out in my own efforts, and also ask a few key questions I hope to see answered.

First of all, I've been doing SEO since way before Penguin and Panda came out. The fact is that Penguin made SEO a great deal more difficult and a lot more expensive. Regardless who you are, the fact is you're going to be doing heavier link building with a lot more finesse than you could have gotten away with in the past.

Back in the day you could literally send tens of thousands of backlinks, rank for years, and never worry about it again. Then Penguin came along and hey, if you pulled some of that link building like I did and many others, your rankings were scorched off the face of the planet. Using tools like the Link Detox and Link Delete, you had to remove the old links before even moving forward.

Then putting on new, fresh, white-hat links would slowly but surely put you forward in search results. But rising in the ranks takes a lot more time, requires PBN networks and heavy spending.

But there's something I've noticed about ranking videos...

Ranking videos, by all means, has become EASIER than it was in the past. And a tiny fraction of the links it would take to rank your website will easily rank your videos. You can dominate smaller keywords online and KILL the game. It's so easy to rank for videos that I end up starting with long tail keywords and eventually I build my way up to ranking for much heavier, harder, more competitive keywords. Because the fact is, you can do it, and it works.

I saw an SEO guy who was making millions online through just doing YouTube SEO... And he said that the figure came out to something like videos being 54 times easier to rank than a website. So you can rank a video with 5400% less effort? Immediately the idea intrigued me.

And, I'm a talented web designer. I'm good at what I do and I am proud of that. In knowing this, I found some SEO sponsors, guys who needed websites that were damn good at SEO. I traded a lot of SEO in exchange for web design. In fact I earned nearly $4,000 in SEO packages in just a short month of working for these companies!

But after the months had passed and the SEO had been nearly used up, I realized that ranking was HARD! That much high quality SEO would have been well enough back in the day, but now it seemed like it just didn't make a dent. In fact, one of my websites got hit HARD recently, and even though I was (once again) on page 2 for all my keywords, my rankings dropped dramatically. But when you look at my WebMasterTools, there's no PM from Google team, and when I research the links built, my risk is very low and in fact everything is Penguin Friendly.

I tracked the root of the problem down to a possible error in my website configuration. Apparently Google didn't like the way I had it set up, because MajesticSEO kept giving me a 406 unacceptable error. As of today, the 406 error remains on a Majestic crawl. But my website shows up totally fine in all browsers I've tested.

Anyway, long story short, while all this was going on I was building a small amount of links to a video I have. And God, it's like no matter what I do, I have to face the music. While I was spending TONS of money (well, free money, but still) on my website, in the meantime my video was flying up in the rankings on Google quickly and I was BARELY doing anything. Maybe $50/mo of SEO, which I get discounted to $25/mo, which gets my video to #3 in just a few months for my MAIN keywords, and it is already ranking on the first page in many results. The bigger keywords, I'm so close now. In the Videos section on Google I'm #3, #4 and #5 for all my biggest keywords. All I have to do is push forward to #1 to enable me to get on the front page of all of those big keywords, and knock the one video from the home page out of it's spot.

BUT I have one really big question I keep trying to answer: how do you research which keywords have VIDEOS on the front page of Google? About 75%+ of searches don't have a video on the front page, from my experience. So other than manually searching, what tools exist which will find you keywords on GOOGLE that have a VIDEO on the front page and are easy to rank for?

How many videos you have on your channel.I don't follow that made up rule if a video don't exist on the first page on Google it's impossible to rank.I heard that this guy http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/members/759945-breaknbrix.html has that tool you are seeking.

I'll definitely check it out, looking at the link now. The channel I'm ranking has only 2 videos on it and has had no trouble taking over the biggest keywords in the niche, and easily got onto first page for the smaller, long tail keywords. You really think you can rank a video on the first page even if one doesn't exist? That would be really awesome.

beats4legends said:

I'll definitely check it out, looking at the link now. The channel I'm ranking has only 2 videos on it and has had no trouble taking over the biggest keywords in the niche, and easily got onto first page for the smaller, long tail keywords. You really think you can rank a video on the first page even if one doesn't exist? That would be really awesome.

Click to expand...

Yes you can a rank a video on page first of Google that didn't had a video on the first page on Google I have done it and have evidence of this but doesn't happen a 100% of the time.Google does filter videos for certain keywords from reaching the first page.Some cases because no one haven't optimize the video for that keyword so you won't see a video on Google serps.Don't follow made up rules,SEO is not an exact science so you have test things so see whats ranks or not.

Crazy, I've never seen that done before. Personally I just figured all videos got back links to them, so naturally if Google was going to rank a video, they would. But I suppose through power of sheer back links it could do it.

Interesting enough, YouTube videos use the same keyword categorization system that regular SEO uses.

The bottom line is you need to think in terms of main niches and sub-niches.

Think of related terms.

You see, it's very hard to rank for certain videos in competitive niches on YouTube if you hit those niches head on.

In other words, you are using the same keywords thousands of other video producers are using.

I hope you can see how futile and useless that would be.

Focus instead on related sub-niches and less saturated keywords.

You may be thinking that doing things this way would produce less traffic.

You would be absolutely correct that the videos you produce and tag this way would produce less traffic.

The good news is small trickles of traffic can add up to a large river of traffic.

This is extremely important to note because if this is highly-targeted traffic, you can actually make more money with less traffic as long as it's highly-targeted traffic.