With 4 billion views per day and 72 hours of content uploaded every minute, Youtube has begun attracting the third largest amount of traffic in the world (Alexa). It’s the second leading search engine in the world, so your Youtube Search Engine Optimization is just as important as your website SEO.
Here are some key ways to improve Youtube SEO:
1.Title, Description, and Tags
The title, description, and tags section of your corporate Youtube page is extremely important for SEO. Tags hold keywords and phrases describing your video.
Each word or phrase in a tag should be parted by a comma. The description section should contain a keyworded definition of your video at the top, followed by links to your website, playlists, subscription, channel, and all other websites below. Lastly, your title should be compelling, have keywords in it, and be accurate as well.
All three sections – the title, description, and tags – if used with common keywords – will optimize your SEO.
Tip: Use Google’s keyword tool to help you develop your keywords for these sections:
https://ads.youtube.com/keyword_tool
2. Social Networks
Youtube is in 53 countries and in 61 languages, so obviously social media can improve SEO performance. Getting other users involved, commenting on other videos, and inviting and subscribing to similar niche users can improve your SEO as well. Embedding video straight into a social page (a blog, Facebook, etc.) or linking it back to your website can also improve SEO. Likes and favorites increase search rankings as well. Improved Youtube SEO could mean more channel views, a higher Youtube rank, more subscriptions, and more opportunities to make business connections in the social realm.
3. Keep Content Current
Create compelling and interesting content, that creates value for the consumer and a reason to visit your channel.
4. Youtube Analytics
Analytics are built into Youtube to track the impact of your content and the audience response. The actions you take based on these analytics will determine your success.
YouTube analytics enable you to figure out your videos most viewed days of the week and user demographics. Find out which videos consistently perform better than others. Think about why they are performing better, and take it into account when creating your next video. You can analyze when and why someone subscribed to your channel, how much time someone spent watching your videos, and where your users are coming from.
5. Video Response
Learn the effortless power of a video response. Pick a relevant video to your industry (particularly one that has a lot of views) and respond with a video of your own. Your video will potentially show up right underneath theirs, and become highly visible to other viewers. This is an extremely easy way to get noticed by hundreds of thousands of people, with very little work. Your video must be okayed by the user first.
6. Thumbnails
According to Cisco, by 2016, global video traffic will make up 54% of all of the Internet traffic. So not only does your content need to be interesting, it needs to be viewed. Thumbnails – the small, still shots that represent your video – can easily entice viewers to click on your video.
Although not previously allowed on Youtube, thumbnails can now be creative, fun, interesting, or controversial. To access your video, users have to click on your thumbnail before anything else. Thumbnails can show up all over and in different sizes – when a video ends, in the right column of a page, etc,
7. Annotations
Annotations are a great way of engaging your viewer. They come in the form of speech bubbles, notes, titles, spotlights, and labels. Use annotations to create links to your previous or your next videos, links to your social media, or simply thank the user for watching. The most popular annotation is a link to subscribe. Think about converting your viewers to subscribers to help increase page ranking.
8. Captions
Use captions to improve SEO, as Youtube picks up on typed keywords. To upload captions, go to a caption creation site like www.captiontube.appspot.com, and it will easily allow you to place captions alongside your video.
9. Name Your Video File
MOV7263.avi is an example of what a video file might look like when saving your Youtube video. Unfortunately, the original file name is pointless, and should be replaced with a catchy, relevant description. Youtube will pick up the keywords and you’ll improve your SEO.
10. A Few Words About Content
Suffice to say, content is the most important driver of SEO. Video appeal is the number one reason for gaining likeability, credibility, views, subscribers and comments, all of which contribute to an improved SEO.
A couple of ways to improve the effectiveness of your videos:
– Keep your videos short (3-5 minutes).
– Always create a call to action. Ask viewers to click on your URL, to like your video, or subscribe to your channel at the end of your video.
– Finally, check out the content that’s trending to create the best videos. Websites like Topsy, Followerwonk, and Google Trends allow you to create research based, user-friendly videos.
It takes time, but with dedication, your views, likes, and subscriptions will start to grow. Your visibility will start to evolve. You’ll start to understand your analytics and use them to your advantage. And you’ll have an SEO strategy that will completely transform your Youtube experience.
