SEO for Youtube (Optimizing Your Content for YouTube)

SEO for YouTube

Optimizing Your Content for YouTube

By Syed Waqas SaghirSearch Engine Optimizer (SEO)

Hum TV Interactive Division

Introduction

Publishing a lot of content and optimizing that content so it gets found in search engines is an important part of internet marketing.

Videos are an important part of content, and given that YouTube is by far the most popular video website, you should be publishing videos there.

So Who Watches YouTube Videos?

Tips for Optimizing YouTube Content

1) Title & Description

Just like on-page SEO for web pages, it need to optimize the basic text information describing your videos: the titles and descriptions.

Just keep in mind that your video title should be fewer than 66 characters, since titles longer than that will be truncated in Google search.

Keyword research can be performed through Wordtracker, Google Adwords, keywordspy etc.



Google crawler always starts crawling consider the position from left to right keywords phrase.

Let’s say your company sells shoes and you just recorded and uploaded a video about "casual sneakers." You want to use the phrase in the title twice to maximize SEO impact –- once at the front and once at the end, like this: "Casual Sneakers — How to Choose Casual Sneakers 101."



Description can be longer (2-3 sentences or more is fine), and it should also contain keywords and variations of keywords.

Including a link early on in the description is a good idea, since only the first few lines of the description is visible by default (without clicking 'show more'). To include a link in the description, just add a full URL (including http://) in your description. You can use http://tinyurl.com or https://bitly.com/ to shorten your long URL.

http://tinyurl.com/

https://bitly.com/


2) Tags

For SEO, you should include at least 5-7 relevant keywords as tags for your video. Using tags will associate your video with other similarly tagged videos, which will allow your video to be shown as a "related video."

This will help you generate additional views from people who were originally watching other videos.


3) Popularity/Views

The popularity of your video (the total number of views and the number of views in the past 24-48 hours) is an important factor in how well your video will rank in search results.

YouTube prefers to show visitors popular videos because they are almost always better quality videos.

This is why it's so important for you to get as many eyes on your video as possible in a short period of time. To do so, share links to your newly published YouTube video in social media, embed the video on your blog, and promote it in other channels like email to generate views in boost your video's popularity.


4) Inbound Links/Embeds

Inbound links (links from other websites to your website or video) are important in traditional SEO. They are also important in YouTube SEO, considering that an embedded video (when a YouTube video's code is added to a website, displaying the video outside of YouTube) functions like an inbound link.

You can see how many links and embeds a video has accumulated using YouTube Analytics, YouTube's internal analytics tool for account administrators. To access your channel's YouTube Analytics, log into your account, click on your username tab in the top right corner, click 'Video manager,' and then select 'Analytics.' Then take a look at the video's 'Playback Locations.'


4) Inbound Links/Embeds

Getting more websites to link to and embed your video will help it rank better in search results, so, as we mentioned before, promote your video to people who might embed it or link to it.


5) Ratings & Comments

Higher ratings and more comments are also indications of higher quality and more interesting videos, so it's helpful to generate as many 'thumbs up' ratings and comments as you can for SEO purposes.

The best way to do this is to create awesome content, but if you've already created your video, encourage your fans to check out your video via your blog and social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, Google+, or LinkedIn.


6) Naming the Video File with Keywords

If you are uploading a video about the ‘Kadurat Humtv Episode 4’ then the file name of the video should be something like “Kadurat-Humtv-Episode4.avi” or something similar. MOV0234.AVI is not going to be meaningful.

The viewer of the video does not look at this but YouTube gives a relevancy credit to the file name because if your file name is named with your keyword then there is a better chance that your video is about what it says.


7) Create and use playlists

YouTube has a feature called Playlists that allows users to group videos spread across YouTube into a single list or collection.

If your video is added to a Playlist, it can increase the SEO power of your video. We can see Playlists as social signals about videos that are popular or valuable to YouTube users, and well all know that Google’s working hard to integrate social signals into Its search algorithms.

The best way as per YouTube SEO strategy is to create playlist with all those keywords that are relevant to your content and the keyword should be in good searches.


Bonus Tip: Suggested Search

Go to YouTube and in the search bar start typing your targeted keyword(s). You will see a drop down list of suggested searches that pop up below.

These are common searches performed by users and is a good place to start when trying to think of targeted keywords to start with. It is also a good way to think of topics for future videos.


Share – Going Viral!

To be successful a video must go viral…

Frequently Asked Questions

Technology

SEO for Youtube (Optimizing Your Content for YouTube)