YouTube SEO: Optimizing Your Videos

YouTube SEO: Optimizing Your Videos:from Business 2 Community by Lea Chastine

It’s clear that an emphasis on the visual has changed the way Internet users interact and share information in today’s digital world–video should not be overlooked. Just like any other aspect of a business’s online campaign, videos should be optimized to ensure maximum searchability.
YouTube is the most popular video-hosting website, today. It’s also the second largest search engine in the world. Overall, YouTube gets over 4 billion views per day, so if your business is on YouTube you have the potential to reach a very large audience. The key is getting your content found among the vast YouTube archives. The following tips should help your videos make moves to the top of the search results.

Content is key

Behind all good SEO lies good content–or at least that’s how it should be. If you don’t create interesting, quality content, what is the point of optimizing it for search? No one wants to watch a boring, poorly made video. If you have good content, SEO will (hopefully) boost its success, but it won’t make a bad video good. The point is to start from the beginning and make great content first, then go on to optimizing it for search.

Google’s Penguin and Panda both encourage strong content.
Learn how to optimize your website to please Google.

If possible, capture and upload HD video. In almost all cases, HD videos outrank standard definition videos on YouTube. Creating quality content will also help when your video is being rated and commented on. The better the video, the better the feedback. Have someone unaffiliated watch and critique your video before you publish it. Make changes if necessary. This will help you make your content even better!

Keyword placement

Keywords are always important. For the most part, you want to include relevant keywords wherever possible. Stay consistent and place them in the title, description, meta-tags, and even the video file name. By renaming your file name from, let’s say, “MOV0123.AVI” to “youtube-video-seo.avi,” you will ensure that YouTube gives your video file more relevancy credit. If you need help generating keywords, YouTube actually offers a keyword generating tool to help you find relevant keywords. It also tells you how many times each keyword phrase is searched monthly. Cool, right?

Use closed captions – and correct them

YouTube now creates automatic closed captions for any video that it detects speech from. You can access them in videos with a “CC” button in the bottom right corner. YouTube doesn’t always detect speech perfectly, but if you take the time to correct the caption text it can go a long way. For example, if someone searches a unique string of words from your captions, your video can be more easily found of YouTube and Google. To edit your caption text, log in to YouTube, go to your Video Manager, choose a video to edit, click on “Captions” in the upper left region, click on “Machine Transcript”, and click any line from the script to edit it. If YouTube does not automatically detect speech from your video, you can upload a file on this screen below.

Promote!

Through gaining more views, higher ratings, and more comments, your video can reach the top of YouTube search results more quickly. To do so, leverage your social networks. Social media syndication will allow you to reach those who are already fans of your content and allow them so share with other potential viewers. Post each video to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. Embedding the videos on the company website and company blog will greatly impact the number of views, too. Promote your videos as you would any other piece of content, with context in mind.
If you’re not on YouTube, perhaps this post will convince you to create an account. You simply can’t ignore the potential to reach so many people through video. The world is becoming more visually-oriented, so go out and do something about it!

Still need help getting started? Check out our Free Content Creation Kit!