I’ve become a big fan of Vimeo lately and plan on making it a home to the Link Building Podcast as well as Youtube and IM Broadcast. There have been a lot of video hosting sites launched but Vimeo has managed to become a leader of the pack and I’d like to look a little more into that reason. Before I get into that I’d like to declare I may not be 100% accurate with my theory but I’ll present some good evidence as to why and how they’ve used link building to gain some momentum.
First up we have to take a look at their site design as well as the Vimeo player to see why they have got an edge. I’ve rarely seen such well thought out web design such as their’s, and I’ve never liked pastel so much. The video player both embedded and on site looks crisp and neat, especially when you look at Youtube’s or Metacafe…they’re just plain ugly. Vimeo has established itself as a place to host high quality video in both realms of production and quality so it makes a great place for a professional to showcase work.
So how does link building come into play? Well recently I’ve noticed they’ve made the links on embedded videos do follow and it is helping(I believe) in a big way. Because the quality and content Vimeo usually showcases it seems they’re able to gain a large amount of quality links across quality blogs and websites. A lot of other video hosting sites are not doing this and if you take a quick look at their Alexa and the number of backlinks they have apposed to a few of their competitors;
Now I’m aware that the traffic growth is mainly due to the amazing content that has been going viral, but as we’ll see next they’ve been gaining massive amounts of links quickly, and since I last checked a week ago, they’re up over 50,000 backlinks! The data listed next was used with Yahoo’s Site Explorer so keep that in mind. I only used these few video sites to compare because I’ve felt they were all started up within the same time frame and seem to be competing for the more “technically gifted” market share;
Website: Backlinks:
Vimeo.com 181,140
Blip.tv 129,405
Revver 96,355
Viddler.com 36,824
Well I don’t like to see myself on camera much but you folks now get the idea of what I’m talking about. See how the links are done out below the video, turn on your SEO browser plugin to make sure they’re do follow and start to think. This setup could work very nicely to your advantage, especially if you were trying to rank a video for a keyword you would otherwise have no chance in tackling right away. If 200 people embed your video you’ll be able to build your clients through the video marketing which can be very successful, depending on what you’re doing. Now think within your niche, you could provide something to embed which builds links for you which lets you kind of sit back and enjoy.
