YouTube link-building strategy is a powerful digital marketing strategy you can use to build quality backlinks to your site/blog, create more awareness of your brand, and increase exposure for your content. As you probably know now, backlinks are among the most important ranking factors for search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing. You can also use YouTube to build high-quality backlinks to increase your website DA and PA metrics for better SEO.
But what are YouTube Backlinks?
A YouTube backlink is a link from YouTube that come to your website that can be both a dofollow and nofollow link. Who can create YouTube backlinks on custom links, comments, end screens, user profiles, cards, and video descriptions?
YouTube link-building step-by-step guide
1.Create a YouTube account
Creating a personal account is the first step in the YouTube link-building strategy. You can also create backlinks on your private YouTube channel.
To create a personal YouTube account, you can follow these steps:
- First, you need to sign in to your Google account.
- Then, go to YouTube and then click “Sign In.”
- After that, click “Create Account” and choose “For Me.”
After setting up your new account, you can now create your YouTube channel to build backlinks to your site.
2.Set up a YouTube Brand Account
Another way to get YouTube backlinks for search engine optimization is to create your Brand account. A brand account is designed especially for your brand, and it is separated from the personal statement. You can do link-building as your brand name in this type of account and double up your backlinking efforts. A YouTube channel linked to a Brand Account means that multiple users can manage that channel from their Google accounts.
Creating a YouTube Brand Account is an important feature, especially if you have a digital marketing team or if you are willing to outsource your YouTube SEO in the future. To set up a Brand YouTube Accounttake a look at the following steps:
- Sign in to your Google Account and then go to YouTube.
- After, navigate to your YouTube channel list and click “Create a New Channel.”
- Then fill out the details required and name the Brand Account.
- After verifying your account, click “Create,” In this way, you will set up a new Brand Account (with its channel included).
3.Add backlinks to your YouTube channel.
The third step consists of putting YouTube backlinks, and it works for both: personal and brand YouTube channels. here is how to add backlinks on your YouTube channel about your web page:
- First, go to your private YouTube channel and click on the “Customize Channel” button.
- Then click on the “Basic Info” tab and scroll down to the “Links” section.
- The final tip is to add up to 5 URL backlinks to any page you want.
4.Put backlinks to your YouTube channel banner.
After adding backlinks to your channel, you need to know that you can add the same backlinks to your YouTube channel Banner to get extra value out of them. To put your backlinks on your channel Banner, you need to:
- Scroll down to the “Links on Banner” section.
- Choose the total number of backlinks (less than 5) you want to show on the YouTube channel Banner.
- Then, your backlinks will appear as icons on your channel Banner.
5.Add a link to your YouTube video description.
It is important to know that YouTube video descriptions are the best (most popular) place to create backlinks for your website. What makes it even better is that you can add as many links as you want in every video description field without exceeding the 5,000 characters – no more than 800 words.
You can not just create a long list of random links, but you need to surround these backlinks with relevant keywords. And that is not only good for SEO, but it will also improve the topical relevance of your links for off-page SEO.
Plus, the surrounding text is important for Google’s algorithm, and it is used to index the target URL for proper keywords. You also need to know that the technical term for this concept is annotation text, which refers to the result of adding a note to a certain text.
6.Post backlinks in your YouTube video comments
Commenting on your videos (or other people’s videos) can be another way to use YouTube for link-building. You need to avoid spamming the comments with links to prevent your account from getting flagged.
Suppose these comments are useful and helpful for many YouTube users. In that case, you can significantly improve the traffic quality of your pages, and at the same time, it is a powerful way to build backlinks for SEO.
The best strategy to power your YouTube backlink strategy through comments is creating more than one new backlink per day (or 3 per week) and finding relevant videos to make your comment on (including these backlinks).
7.Add links to YouTube cards.
YouTube cards are clickable CTAs (call-to-actions) that can add to your YouTube videos. This YouTube feature takes viewers to another channel, video, or site, and who can use it for your YouTube link-building strategy.
Anyway, you need to know that this feature is only available to channels already signed up for the YouTube Partner Program. And you can only link out to the site connected with your account, not to any website on the Internet.
You can add YouTube Cards to your videos in 2 different ways:
- During the uploading process.
- By editing an existing video on your channel. And this is how you can do it:
- Go to the right side of the editor screen, underneath “End Screens” and the “Playlists” dropdown menu.
- Then, click on the “Cards” button.
8.Add links to your End Screens.
End Screen is a YouTube feature that appears in the last seconds (5-20) of your video, and it is another place you can use for SEO link-building. You can do that by adding your site’s hyperlink to (at least) one of the end screen placeholders.
Like in the YouTube Cards feature, you can add an End Screen with your site in the same ways:
- During the uploading video process
- By clicking on the “End Screens” button – it appears on the right side of the editor screen – underneath the “Playlist” menu.
9.Build backlinks to your YouTube videos
After learning how to create backlinks to your site from YouTube, it is time to learn how to build backlinks to your YouTube videos. And the reason why is that building backlinks to your YouTube channel (or videos) can increase the PA of those URLs.
URLs with high page authority pass more link equity through backlinks on the web page, improving the PR value of the linked web page for search engine optimization.
The more high-quality backlinks your YouTube video URL has, the more positive impact it has on the pages it is linking out to. Therefore, you will need to build the strongest links possible pointing to your site and follow different tips on creating backlinks on several social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Reddit.
10.Stay active on YouTube.
The last tip for using YouTube backlinks for search engine optimization is all about being consistent and stable. You need to stay active on the YouTube platform and keep building backlinks regularly (as many as possible).
You should also create a great YouTube channel and provide valuable content for your industry. This will help your site attract more target traffic and generate more organic backlinks.
The most well-known YouTube channels can be precious for indirect SEO improvements because they can help you increase the number of other (relevant) websites that will naturally link to your video and increase your brand awareness.
Is the YouTube platform good for backlinks?
As you discovered in this article, YouTube can be good for backlinks as it has many places where you can create, add, and build backlinks. These backlinks can help you drive (new) organic traffic to your site and also help you increase your site’s backlink profile score for search engine optimization. So, in simple terms, YouTube is a valuable social media platform for both; link-building and brand awareness.
Are YouTube backlinks dofollow links?
YouTube backlinks are only dofollow links when they are inserted on your YouTube channel profile, video cards, end screens, and custom links section. When inspecting an HTML code for the areas as the above, you can see that there is no rel=”nofollow’ attribute, and this is the evidence that YouTube backlinks are dofollow links.
Do YouTube backlinks help SEO?
With just being part of your site’s backlink profile, YouTube backlinks play a big role and do help search engine optimization. YouTube links (or any other relevant link on different sites or social media platforms) are good for your search engine optimization performance and significantly increase search engine visibility and referral traffic.
