Using Search Engines to Promote Your Projects

Search engines are incredibly important to spread the word about your business, your YouTube channel, and the like. When you search on Google, Bing, or whatever search engine you use, you get a handful of results. Within these results, you’ll find some organic, or unpaid results, and some paid results, which will always be at the top. Now this begs the question: how do you promote your project, so it pops up more in search? Well, there are two different ways, SEM and SEO (search engine optimization).

SEM is basically paying for advertisements to show up as a top result. At high levels, advertisers can bid for whatever keywords they want and create ads to show up for when someone searches for that keyword. This method allows for quick results, so once your campaign is launched you can start generating returns within minutes. Data from SEM is far superior, and you can get competitive insights. It also gives you a platform to test out different experiences to learn what works the best for your audiences regarding keywords, ad copy, and other variables. However, the downside of this is the continued cost. For a small business or a growing YouTube channel, this method is not exactly sustainable.

SEO on the other hand is, in my opinion, the better method in this case. While it takes a long time to get established, it has long term value. The results that you receive will have inherent trustworthiness that cannot be paid for. I, myself, have been using some aspects of SEO in my job as social media director for WSOU 89.5 FM. We have a youtube channel, where we post interviews with different artists in the metal music scene. To hopefully appear higher up in search, for video descriptions, we try to get in some different key words, like metal, the band we’re listening to, interview, and the like. Consistently doing this and creating relevant content will eventually be picked up by Google and show some long term results. The same goes for photos too, I was told by an SEO expert that youtube thumbnails and Instagram graphics should have these keywords in the file name as well. So far, it has been working, but time will only tell what the future holds.