YouTube can be a massive opportunity to gain leads; and to make it easier for you, we have researched top 10 tips to increase your search rankings with YouTube video optimization.
When you think of search engines of course Google comes to mind but when you think of the second largest search engine out there not many think of YouTube. YouTube is the second largest search engine; it’s bigger than Yahoo and Bing. Yet many companies including great name brands neglect important search engine optimization (SEO) strategies for YouTube. Considering that YouTube streams more than 1.2 million videos per day, it is not an avenue to be ignored. Anyone who conducts commerce online should consider YouTube optimization tips to give their brand an SEO advantage.
First know that there are two types of YouTube channels; these are brand channels and user channels. Brand channels are given out to advertisers who spend a lot of money on YouTube, and these have some distinct advantages over user channels, including auto-play when a user lands on the view page. They also have other benefits like multiple sub-channels, a 960×150 banner, a 300×250 side column image, a branding box, contest module support, support for YouTube’s Carousel, Video Walls, and custom gadgets, a larger background image, and support for Google Analytics.
Here are top 10 YouTube SEO tips that you should know before starting with YouTube:
1. First of all how you set up your channel is important. Make your channel as a brand. Your video will automatically get the good preference from the search engine. So for better YouTube SEO don’t put your video here and there. Put it in a single channel, give that a brand kind of & generalized title (specialization will kill the scope of a channel), proper trailer, proper description and keywords. Regular video posting is also a good way to become a good brand. Number of videos in your channel helps you to become good brand.
2. Include links to other content within your profile page. Ideally, you will be linking to other social media profiles like Facebook and Twitter in order to extend the social media experience, but you also might want to drive clicks to a customized landing page.
3. Search engine optimization can be broken down into three disciplines: content, linking, and architecture. YouTube already provides the architecture of your page; hence YouTube optimization techniques are reliant on the quality and quantity of content on your page. Try to engage your viewers with catchy, funny material that can generate traffic to your content. Make videos that are engaging yet informative for your core audience.
4. Your video title is very important in Video SEO and should be keyword rich. There are primarily two places you can rank well for your target keywords. The first place is on YouTube itself; for example, if I type “SEO” into the YouTube search bar, the results are my choice of “All,” “Channels,” and “Playlists,” with the default view being “All.” It is possible to sort the results a number of different ways, but the default sorting method is “Relevance,” so the way you see results on a YouTube page is similar to how you might see them on other search engines. The other place your videos can rank well is on the search engines themselves. It is important to remember that the videos themselves are invisible to search engines so keyword rich descriptions are essential.
5. Descriptions are equally as important for this reason. 90% viewers don’t read the description but search engine does. It is also important to repeat relevant keywords within video descriptions. You need to describe your video as much as you can for better YouTube SEO.
6. Include video transcripts whenever possible within descriptions. This is important even if the transcript is a description of the video’s content. Until the technology improves, YouTube and other online videos are practically invisible to most search engines. Therefore, the search engines are only guessing about the content of your video based on the information they parse from the title, description, and tags. However by providing a full transcript of your video within the description, the search engines will fully understand the video.
7. Take advantage of features like YouTube annotations and captions. You can add notes, subtitles, descriptions, and links directly over the top of the video. Currently only links to other YouTube pages are clickable in video but if you followed our tip to place links within your content’s description then you can place call to action icons over the video that says, “Click here to become a fan of our Facebook page.”
8. Organize videos into playlists. The playlist is one of the best features introduced by YouTube. For YouTube search engine optimization, you should categorize the videos in your channel and it will provide one additional level of description (channel description > playlist description > video description). Again, do not be shy about providing relevant keywords and tags within the descriptions.
9. Social media networking not only increases your traffic but it will also help with YouTube SEO. If the traffic is coming from different source then that video will get higher ranking. Links to your video on your site or other sites will count as a backlink to your video page. Backlink can increase your video rank in search engines. So share your video and embed your video code on different sites. One of the best ways is to give the video link as a response to other threads.
10. Posting regularly will help you to increase your ranking in search engines. It also indicates to other users that your site is active. Actively posting gets you exactly the attention you are looking for. The more “likes”, “favorites,” and “subscribes” your content gets from fans, the more it will be liked by search engines too. Respond to comments in the first few hours after your video is posted, because those viewers are your core audience. Building comments early also helps increase the video’s ranking in search.
Those are the top ten YouTube SEO tips that can boost search engine rankings for your content and may drive traffic to your sites. Try them and you will be pleasantly surprised with the results of this lesser used SEO techniques.