Increase Youtube Video Rankings with Satellite Channels
Posted by Ben Sibley on Jul 30, 2012 | 136 commentsThis is a technique that I came up with to make my Youtube video rankings higher in the Youtube and Google search results.
The idea is to upload a video to Youtube targeting a keyword of your choice. Next, create what I call a “satellite channel” and optimize the channel entirely for that one keyword. The purpose of this channel is not to rank for your keyword, but instead to boost the rankings of the video on your main channel.
Before I go any further, here’s an example of how I used this technique to get the number #1 result for a product review keyword.
At the time of writing this, my video has the following ranking results:
In Google:
Ubot Studio Review – #1
Ubot Review – #6
In Youtube:
Ubot Studio Review – #1
Ubot Review – #1
I have my sleeves full of tricks when it comes to Youtube (find them here), but this one is a bit different.
This is the satellite channel that I created. As you can see, it is entirely optimized for the keyword “Ubot Review”.
These are the steps I took to optimize it:
1) Change username to keyword
By using my keyword as my channel’s name, I got my keyword in the title tag, h1 tag, and also in the URL. As you probably know, these are all extremely important on-page SEO factors.
If you can’t use your exact keyword just add an additional word at the end like “101″ or use an article like “a” or “the” somewhere in it because it will be ignored. While Youtube isn’t great with stemming, they generally tend to cancel out stop words.
2) Add a link to main video
The next step I took was to put a link to my main video that the channel was created to boost. When editing your channel’s sidebar, there is a spot where you can add links to any URL you want. Use your keyword as anchor text and link to your main vid here. Because it’s an internal link, it’s dofollow.
3) Add a link to main channel
For good measure, I added a link in the sidebar to my main channel.
4) Create three videos optimized for related keywords.
Two of the videos I made were optimized for related keywords that came up during my keyword research. The other one targeted the same exact keyword.
Each of these videos simply linked to the full review here on my site in their description.
The reason for this is two-fold. First off, they will get some traffic and may grab rankings of their own. This is why I link directly to my review here so I can profit from that traffic.
Secondly, they create additional relevant pages that link back to the satellite channel. Basically, this is internal, tiered link building. Here’s a visual representation for my visual learners:
In my opinion, there’s no link Youtube likes more than a link from Youtube.
I still have a lot of things to try, but this is the basic formula that worked well for me. By no means do you need to follow this rigidly, but I think the idea of utilizing Youtube satellite channels is very handy and effective for increasing video rankings.
Another tool I use and would recommend for video rankings is Traffic Kaboom (my traffic kaboom review)
In reference to future content, do you like posts about Youtube and video SEO? I have some more stuff I could post if it’s an area of interest.
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Your so-called “technique” seems can work, but maybe a little difficult to achieve it. But lt’s full of significance.
Hi Yumi,
It certainly takes some additional effort, but it isn’t too hard to do.