How YouTube Personalization Can Help SEO Your Website

[Juan]

YouTube is rolling out a beta version of a personalized home page. I think this is great and could have implications for SEO.

I think this is a sign that Google sees its personalization efforts as successful. I assume I don’t need to remind you that Google now owns YouTube, which means the move is a Google executive decision. So the SEO implications are even more far reaching than one I’m about to tell you.

In terms of SEO, since many webmasters use YouTube videos as embeds on their blogs and websites, personalization could make these embeds more accessible. If I, for instance, have a tendency to embed videos about search engine optimization and internet marketing on my blog then when I log into my YouTube account I should get recommendations for videos tagged as search engine optimization or internet marketing. These will mostly be videos I haven’t seen yet.

The personalized home page, according to YouTube’s blog, will focus on three improvements:

Recommendations
Subscriptions
Activity of Friends
What this means for active YouTube members is you will get recommendations based on past videos watched, but you’ll also be given the latest uploads from your subscriptions and be able to keep track of the latest videos uploaded by your friends. That’s three ways that you can use YouTube for Internet marketing purposes.

Recommendations will be taken care of by YouTube, of course. But subscriptions can be targeted. And friends, too, can be targeted. Plus, you can use YouTube’s internal messaging system to let your friends know that you’ve uploaded a new video.

While none of this is SEO-related per se, you can increase your SEO simply by networking through YouTube. Whenever a friend uses a video on their website or blog they may, and you can make it available through your profile, decide to link to your website or blog. When used as a networking tool, YouTube can become another method of increasing your SEO benefits. Personalization will go a long way to helping you do that better.

Nick Stamoulis