Using Backlinks as a MTG Content creator - its free real estate!

Backlinking is a handy trick to make your content more discoverable. You have probably heard content creators talking about the Youtube algorithm, "Smash that button for the Youtube Algorithm" they say!

Optimizing your title, having a good thumbnail and a description is incredibly important for visibility and clicks within Youtube. But what Youtube content creators sleep on is SEO, Search Engine Optimization. Some because they are not aware of it, many because they have no good way to improve it in any way. But not you, not after reading this article on how easy it is for an MTG Content creator to get more leverage for visibility on traditional search engines. It is free real estate and you are missing out on it!

 HelloGoodGame's recent video is a great case study of a great title and thumbnail combined leveraging AetherHub for SEO.

The above video has a very good searchable name, and as you can see a Google search on "easiest way to mythic" gives me Youtube videos on the top from the most SEO friendly search hits, and since the user also posted the deck with the same title on AetherHub it also pops up as the first non-youtube related search hit. Following this link gives you the full decklist, an embedded view of the video, and links to the video, their Youtube and Twitch Channel.

One thing you see in the Google results is some generic description text about MTGA Assistant which was written by us, this is an important takeaway for an easy improvement when posting your deck on AetherHub when it is linked to a video: Copy the description from your Youtube video into the deck description! You most likely do a short writeup for the youtube video and you can just put it in the deck description. We also have a profile signature option that will show up in all your decks so go into your account settings and add a short description so when the Google bot crawls it will pick up either of those two texts instead of our generic ad text for our extension.

What is Backlinking and why is it important?

As the name suggests, the art of backlinking is when you post a link to your content on for example Youtube from another website. Search engines use bots to crawl the internet, the way they work is they follow links and "crawl" through websites that way. The more links they find to your content the higher it gets rated. At least that is the simple version of it, as you can imagine there is a lot more that goes into calculating these points. Optimizing SEO is a really advanced topic, there are a lot of caveats and none disclosed information in the same way there is with the Youtube algorithm.

Having some backlinks to your content from other sites is really important to get a bit of a boost on Google. Content creators on Youtube mostly just focus on pleasing the Youtube algorithm but rarely pay attention to SEO, posting the content on your social media is important but It does not do much for the Google bots as they do not directly contribute links from Facebook and Twitter to SEO.

The challenge here for Youtube content creators is where do they post their videos? Some use Reddit, which is fine a very good place to post if you can get traction and withstand the flames from its users and it usually only works for some videos. So this is a huge challenge for content creators and is why they usually do not bother. Except if you are a Content Creator that makes Magic the Gathering videos, this is where we come in and offer you some free real estate for your content. 

Leveraging AetherHub as a Content Creator

Over the years I have spent a lot of time building a website that is useful for posting and finding decks, my main focus has always been trying to give value to other people, especially content creators. You guys are one of the things that makes the website unique in that a lot of content creators posts their decks here and we have several systems to help creators grow, earn revenue and reach out to a new audience. While being part of the Content Creator Program has its benefits, it is not needed to post videos and optimize SEO for your content.

When you post a deck on AetherHub your user profile which includes a link to your Twitch and Youtube channel is included in the decklist. Most people would think "yeah sure, maybe a couple of persons will click that link and that's it". What you need to take into consideration here is that for every deck you post on the website, the more SEO points your Twitch and Youtube channels will get (We are also going to include Discord and Twitter links here). In the same regard every time you post a video you will also get a link to the said video which is separate from the embedded video. This is a recent addition I did to improve backlinking for content creators, I realized that only having an embedded video would not give the google bots a link to follow, so this was added early 2020. Good thing is that the link is added on all earlier content too with videos.

If you want to get a bit more technical you can inspect the HTML code for the links and see that these links are bot friendly. There are links on our website that use something called a "rel attribute" called "nofollow" which tells a crawler to not follow the link, this is not present on content creator links. We do use something called "noopener" with is something different to prevent something called cross-origin exploits, so it is a safety-related attribute.

So make sure to include your videos in your decklists! As a content creator on AetherHub not only do you get extra SEO score but your content is placed on our Frontpage! New in 2020 is that videos will also show up inside of our new MTG Arena extension: MTGA Assistant

The latest content creator videos will show up inside of MTGA Assistant! With a link to the decklist and a function to compare the users' collection to the decklist.

But I have non-deck related MTG Content

I have had you in mind for a long time, and I do not know why this did not come to my mind before, but it is probably because our website has changed so much over the time that this was not something that would fit naturally earlier. So in February, I made a new section that only content creators can post in, this is basically a section you just post your video link in together with a title and description. Feel free to just copy the exact same text from Youtube and voila there you go, not only will this content be static in the video section of the website found under the "Database" selection, but it will also show up on the front page when it is posted (Note the cache timer of 1~hour before getting posted).

The brand new page for non-deck related videos.

There you go, you now have the opportunity to get some extra traffic and SEO optimize your videos even if it is not about decks. clicking on one of the videos will bring you to a page where the video is embedded together with a link and a short description.

Things to remember

Lastly some quick tips; Remember to put in a Signature in your profile, a short little description. Linking in the signature is unnecessary as this is what the profile links are for and we are adding attributes to links in profile to prevent bots from exploiting link building. Copy-paste your Youtube description into the AetherHub deck description for some extra points for SEO, it looks way better in the results page too.

A more generic Youtube tip is to always think about your title and thumbnail, having run this website for three years now I do see a lot of bland thumbnails and titles, here is a short example of a recent historic deck, which one would you rather click?

"Historic Treasure Hunt"

or

"The Jankiest deck ever made - Treasure Hunt in Historic"

It is not very hard but a lot of aspiring content creators miss this very simple detail, your title needs some punch and the same with the thumbnail. Another observation I have made, a lot of thumbnails for deck videos all look the same. Not very obvious on Youtube but take a look at our video section, a lot of them looks like they came from the same creator, get in some memes, a captivating text, or you might consider putting yourself in the thumbnail as this is something that is proven that people click on. Rather than stressing a lot about putting out a new deck video, take some time, do some research on tips on what works and what doesn't. You can make the best videos ever, but if no-one clicks it, it will not be discovered.

This is all from me for this time, if you have any other tips for Content creators or want me to cover any other topic in this field let me know in the comments!