Tip #12: Optimizing for YouTube Videos
For the last few blog entries, we have been providing a lot of tips on how to optimize your website. Today, let’s switch gears to look at optimizing for YouTube videos. Like search optimizing for websites and web pages, search optimizing for YouTube videos has many facets to them. Let’s take a look at the 4 main ones –
1. Write Long Video Descriptions
Remember that YouTube and Google can’t watch or listen to your video (yet). That means that they heavily lean on the text surrounding the video to understand your video’s topic. That’s why it is important to populate the description with super-long entries that fully describes your videos. Make sure your descriptions also includes the long-tail keywords of your keyword strategy. (You do have a keyword strategy, right?)
2. Encourage Subscribing and Linking
At the end of your videos, give them a strong call to action to encourage people to subscribe and like your videos
YouTube algorithms don’t use backlinks like Google’s search engine algorithms do. So instead, it puts a lot of weight on the user experience signal, or sometimes called — social signals. Keep this in mind, YouTube really likes subscribes and likes, these are the two most important user experience signals there is on YouTube. When someone likes your video enough to subscribe after watching it, it sends a strong message to YouTube that you have a killer video on your hands. Now when it comes to likes they’re not as valuable as a “subscribe”, but they’re still pretty important and they really can count.
3. Views/Popularity
If your video is popular, it will be ranked higher on YouTube. You should therefore upload a quality video and share the link with your email list, in your social media networks, and other places. Videos are ranked on YouTube based on the number of views they have received in the past 24-48 hours. Moreover, having more views can earn your video honorary placement in the “most viewed videos” category
4. Ratings and Comments
Creating high quality, interesting and educative videos will generate many “likes” and comments. This will help your videos in overall search engine rankings and can lead to many views and links being created to the video. The secret to getting high ratings and comments is to create awesome content that is related to your market. The video can be educative or funny and should be of high quality.
We are exploring different ways you can do to improve on your page ranking on search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo. Follow us on Twitter @EvolutionPoint to get more tips on search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM).