I’ve been talking a lot lately about the concept of Going Wide, and using social media sites both to gain relevant inbound links and to funnel targeted traffic into your website. If you missed those discussions you should be signed up for my (free) weekly webinar, because that’s where I spill the real goods

To promote your website, you need links. And forget link exchanges - you need good internal linking structure in addition to your inbound links, and you need deep links (and lots of them!).

And so, on the topic of Going Wide and getting quality deep links, today’s topic is a super-simple YouTube tip that will make you go “DUH!” if you arent already doing it…

Before I get into the details, if you dont have a YouTube account - set one up today. People like video (some people, I dont) so you need to look at ways you can include this in your online marketing plan.

Also, since Google launched Universal Search last year - in May 2007 - you see YouTube videos appearing in almost every Google search. If you search “how to knit” for example, 2 out of the top 10 results are YouTube videos. If you type in “twitter basics”, my own video is currently #5.

This is the reason you want to publish your videos to YouTube. Not only can you gain exposure through YouTube searches, but also through Google searches. And the more Top 10 spots you can ‘own’ for a relevant Google search, the less spots your competitors can claim on that first page of results

Simple YouTube Tip

When you upload your video, you have several text fields to fill out. One of them is the description field. Put a link in this field, then put your description. The link should point to the blog post where your video is discussed, or to a relevant internal link on your website.

As you can see in the screenshot above, the URL will show up as a clickable link just to the right of your video. Here is a close-up screenshot:

Just linking to your main page doesnt help - you want to send viewers to the exact topic on your site or blog (and you need to stop linking to your home page anyway). This helps to keep all of your content connected, and it will funnel visitors into your website in a way that will get and keep their attention.

I’ve seen many people use their YouTube account as a stand-alone marketing medium, only taking the opportunity to link to the main page of their site in the profile area. But if you are using YouTube to gain exposure and funnel traffic, then you’ll want to start doing some relevant deep linking for every video that you publish.

Forget the fact that YouTube uses the “nofollow” attribute on outgoing links. This tip is less about SEO (search engine optimization) and more about SMO (social media optimization). Granted your YouTube videos can easily claim top 10 rankings in the search results. But what good is all that targeted traffic if they watch your video and then close the window?

If a viewer likes what you have to say in your video, they’ll enjoy clicking through and reading even more from you on that same topic. So start linking your video pages to your content pages, and set up multiple mini-funnels to suck some super-targeted visitors straight into your website!

Best,