What are backlinks and how important are they for YouTube marketing? Google employed two major updates to their system that completely changed the relevance of a backlink to your website or videos.

In years past, you may have created a link strategy that included many shady tactics. For example, if you have a YouTube channel about fishing, it wouldn’t make any sense to get links to beauty sites, right?

That’s when Google stepped in and started penalizing websites and YouTube channels that had too many links from unrelated sources. It was very easy to get thousands of backlinks from third party services, but this will not solve your problem.

In the new era of backlinks and Google Penguin and Panda update posts, there are 8 important things you can do to improve your YouTube views.

First of all, use a wide variety of anchor text. Anchor Text is the visible text in a hyperlink. In most browsers, it’s often the blue, underlined words.

Second, your links must be relevant. This means that if you have a fishing channel, you need to link to other fishing channels and websites.

Third, diversity is important. Let’s say your fishing channel is mostly about bass fishing. You want to link to sites that talk about lures, boats, gear, and any other fishing related sites and channels.

Fourth, use the “follow” and “unfollow” links. This always seems more natural to Google. Using only “follow me” links may seem suspicious.

Fifth, IP addresses have a section called “C Blocks”. You want to get the most binding from IP addresses with different “C Blocks”. Basically, this means that getting links from the same site won’t help you much if you do it too often.

Sixth and seventh, you have a YouTube channel. Maybe you’ll send links to your YouTube channel, but it’s just as important to send links to each of your videos as well.

Eighth, the number of links you get should be proportional to the keyword competition. For example, if the keyword competition has 100 links, it would be silly to get 5000. This could easily trigger an over-optimization penalty flag, so keep your video SEO in mind.

A link can come from various sources. If you’re doing video marketing, there are several ways to get good backlinks.

Post your videos on your blogs. Post your videos on your social networking sites. And build partnerships with other YouTube channels and website owners to naturally improve your links and video views.

Be strategic with your backlinks. It is not recommended to get thousands of backlinks if they are not relevant to your topic. Google and YouTube will reward you if you follow their recommendations.