How To Correctly Add a Hot Link to Your YouTube Videos
Posted by Catie Foertsch on Tue, Nov 08, 2011 @ 09:09 AM
By now you know that putting your business videos on YouTube is a really smart idea - it's one of the ways you can maximize your video roi. And you also know that to get them to perform, you must correctly optimize your YouTube videos so Google and other search engines can find them. Part of that optimization, of course, is including a link back to your website. What you might not know is that it's very easy to get that link wrong. So here's how to do it correctly.
First, you want to add your link to the beginning of your description, so the viewer sees it first thing and can easily follow it back to your site.
Second - and here's where it's easy to make a mistake - you want to make sure to include "http://". Why? Because if you don't, your link is a dud.
Take a look at these two screen shots, taken from a training video we created for Tufts Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine. We uploaded it to our YouTube channel and properly optimized it with tags and a keyword-rich description. And, the description begins with our website address. But - as this image shows, when the address is entered as www.yesmediaworks.com., there's no link. You can see that the text is gray, just like the rest of the text. It's not highlighted to indicate a hot link. It's just dead letters.
This image shows the same video on the same YouTube channel, but this time the web address has been entered as http://www.yesmediaworks.com. You can see right away that the website is highlighted - the letters are blue, not gray - to indicate a hot link.
You'd think that YouTube would be able to figure out, like so many other applications do, that text beginning with 'www' followed by 'something.something' indicates a web address. But no. So you must take responsibility and remember to add 'http://' to the beginning of your web address.
When you do - voila! You've got a hot link straight back to your website.