Ever since YouTube was created, millions of users have uploaded and watched videos online. Many people upload videos displaying their unique talents in hopes of getting their 15 minutes of fame, or post videos to advertise their business. At the end of all this, the main goal of YouTubers and Vloggers is to attract users to watch their videos and subscribe to their channel.
With thousands of videos for each category, how does one possibly get their video to the top? If you understand how search engine optimization (SEO) works, you will know that getting your video to the top requires very similar efforts.
YouTube’s own search engine works in a similar manner to Google (which may be obvious, considering that it is now operating under Google) and requires you to carry out similar tasks that you would carry out to optimize a web page. The dual benefit of optimizing your video on YouTube is that not only will it start to increase in rankings within YouTube’s own organic search, but in fact your video will start to display on Google’s organic search results page as well.
In order to get started, the video itself will need to be optimized. Below are the crucial aspects that you will need to look into in this regards.
Title Tag Of Your Youtube Video:
The headline allows you to have a limit of 99 characters. In your headline you need to include your targeted keywords and any other keywords you may want to rank for, and include your branding and descriptive text.
Video Description:
The description is what will be shown to the user to help them understand what the video is all about. You have 5,000 characters, so use all the space to write as much as possible about your video. You will also need to use some of your keywords in the description. Since keyword rankings play a factor in your search rankings, placing the keywords in your description will help you rank higher in Google search results.
Tags:
The tags section is where you list all of your keywords and more. The best part about this is that if you have more keyword that you can’t fit in the headline or description, this is section is where you put it.
The aforementioned changes are the bare minimum that are required; however there are additional signals that will determine the rank that your video will ultimately receive.
Video Views & Recent Trends
Video views play a heavy part on where your video will rank and is considered a ranking indicator as well. Just note the fact that YouTube only considers a view on a video after it has been viewed by a user for at least 8 seconds. Since merely changing the Meta Tags of your newly uploaded video will not always generate tons of views within a competitive category, it is important to generate views through other marketing efforts. These methods could include publishing your video on your company or personal blogs or on your Facebook or Twitter accounts.
Off-page optimization techniques such as link-building can not only bring views to your video, but also help in overall increase of rank. If you feel that your video can be positioned as a decent video response, by all means give it a try. Many accounts will accept video responses on their videos as they are also a means for them to receive traffic.
At this point, it is important to make sure that we do not get bogged down by mere views on our video. There are videos on YouTube that have a certain number of views, yet still outrank other videos with greater views. Video trends on YouTube are also a factor that gets considered when rankings are assigned. This means that if you have a video with 100k visits, but the rate of increase on the view have marginally deteriorated over the past few months or years, a video with 50k views that has been getting a lot more traction recently may outrank the initial video. It is important to visit the Insight page of your YouTube account and track down how your video is performing in terms of views and other metrics that are provided within that interface.
YouTube “Likes”
Like buttons have become a common trend on many social networking platforms and YouTube hasn’t missed the opportunity to leverage it either.
Google and other search engines are known to consider social signals within their algorithm and the “Like” button is no secret by now.
Note from Rohan : You might want to download our google plus one plugin for wordpress if you haven’t already!
Make sure that you make it a point in your video annotations or in the description to ask for viewers to “Like” your video as they will affect your rankings on YouTube and as well as on Google. This also means that the video you create and upload should provide some value to the viewers in order for them to genuinely like your video and give it a rating.
Once you have all of the aforementioned techniques in place and rolled out – your video should start to see some level of traction, depending on what industry you are in and the amount of competition you have. Remember to promote your video through as many channels as possible, whether on your blog, corporate website, social bookmarks and so on.
Ali Syed is an Internet Marketer at 9th sphere, a web design Toronto firm that was recently voted #1 for their SEO services
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People sometimes forget about all of the optimization opportunities that a video provides. Anytime anything is posted online it’s important to keep SEO in mind. By inserting keywords strategically throughout the description and tags you are increasing the chances that the video will be found.