Video SEO: MySpace Better Than YouTube? (Short Case Study)

I received an e-mail this morning from one of my favorite clients. He clued me into an update on a search result for one of the videos I had done for him a little while back. When we first did the video and submitted it, it showed up in the first page of Google, as usually happens.

After some weeks it dropped off the first page, which is also not unusual.

What he found this morning was a pleasant surprise in the search ranking.

He was checking on the results of a Sqidoo lens he put up and was happy to see that it was in the number one position for the search phrase "custom island exhibits". What he also noticed was that the video, which was done some months back, was now in the number two position (the version hosted on MySpace).

He also owns the next three entries in search results. So he is in a very nice position at the moment.

This shows a couple of things. One is that YouTube is not the only game in town when it comes to ranking well in search engines. Another thing to notice is that when we submitted the video we placed his URL as the first thing in the description.

Do you see how his website URL is listed in the MySpace video description on the search engine results page?

That is one valuable trick for showing a URL back to your site without people even having to see your video!

So keep this in mind when developing and submitting your videos: Keywords in your titles are very important, submit your video to several different posting places, and be sure to put your URL as the first element in your video description.

UPDATE:

A few minutes later I checked again and the video hosted on MySpace jumped back above the Squidoo lens!