Increasingly, it’s getting harder and harder to find sites willing to give you high-quality SEO links. Instead, most web sites today will only give you links that are blocked using a NoFollow tag.

The NoFollow tag tells Google NOT to consider your link in their ranking algorithm. Even though you may get referral traffic from this link, Google will act as if this site had never heard of you at all.

These types of NoFollow links are especially common with large portals, social media sites, blog comments and other sites that allow you to create public profiles.

Let’s take YouTube for example. If you upload a video to the site, you’re allowed to place a URL in the video description. Bur if you look at the source code, you’ll see that there’s a NoFollow tag on this link. I can only assume that YouTube does this to discourage massive bulk spamming and preserve their high signal-to-noise ratio.

However, despite the fact that their outbound links are worthless, there are 2 interesting things about YouTube (and other sites) that SEOs should consider:

• Google considers YouTube to be a very high-quality and authoritative site
• Internal links within the site are DOFOLLOW (Google considers these to be of value in the SEO ranking process)

So Here’s The Plan

For this concept to work, you’ll need to think a bit outside of the box.

In crafting your SEO strategy, your main goal should be to get your company to the front page of Google. And your web site is NOT your company. (Stay with me. This will make sense in a bit.)

The first thing you’ll want to do is create a YouTube profile name containing your important keywords. If, for example, you sell goods made from extremely rare “unicorn leather”… a good YouTube username would be UnicornLeather.

This will help you rank for that specific keyword.

Now, you should create a few high-quality videos that showcase your company and make a strong call to action. Your new YouTube channel will be the landing page that you hope to get listed highly in the search rankings.

Finally, try to find every single video that is remotely relevant to your subject matter, and make a well-thought-out, insightful comment that contributes to the content of those videos. It’s EXTREMELY important that these comments be of high-quality. Do not spam YouTube or you’ll run into problems.

With every comment you make, YouTube will add an internal DoFollow link… using your keyword (UnicornLeather)… and pointing to your YouTube video channel. Now, when people look for “Unicorn Leather” on Google, they’ll be directed at the most authoritative page on this topic… at the most authoritative site… which is your YouTube channel.

This Won’t Happen Overnight

Another tip would be not to overdo it. Search engines take timing into account when evaluating your links. If you come out of the gate with guns blazing… blasting out 1000 comments in the first week… you’ll be labelled as a spammer and sent to the penalty box.

Instead go slow and steady. No more than maybe 3 or 4 comments a day… and keep doing this steadily for months. Eventually, you should notice your rankings start to improve.

And another interesting side benefit that you’ll notice will be a gradual snowball effect… where all of these comments will start producing more and more referral traffic to your channel and your main web site.

It’s not uncommon for SEOs in highly competitive markets to find that their referral traffic often exceeds their search traffic by the time they rank for their desired search term. This is simply because of the number of links required to achieve their goal.

If you do this properly, you can make it so that the top 2 results for your keyword are your web site and your YouTube profile. This strategy can also be applied to other social networking sites until you own every result on the front page for your keyword.

About The Guest Author: Paul Rudo has been a freelance business consultant for over 5 years. He specializes in B2B marketing for technology companies and organizations targeting geographically local clients.