While getting your business’s website to rank should always be your number one priority, there are quite a few advantages to producing, uploading and optimizing a videos with search engine optimization in mind on YouTube. If you didn’t already know, Google owns YouTube. And like their pet project Google+, they reward people who use their service. YouTube has massive and still underutilized SEO potential as the world’s second largest search engine with over 30 million visitors.. per day! Not only will getting your YouTube video ranking get the word out about your business, it will also drive people to your website resulting in an additional SEO boost.
Keyword Research
- Like SEO for all other forms of organic search, your YouTube Optimization journey begins with keyword research. (Focus on Keywords with at least 300 – 500 monthly searches if possible.)
- You’ll want to use tools like Google Keyword Planner as you would in any other case, but if you want your videos to rank in Google search and not just Youtube search, you’ll also want to focus on terms that are “Video Keywords” – or keywords that result in video listings on page one of Google search.
- Video Keywords usually are generated by the following forms of key-phrases: How-to keywords, tutorials, reviews/testimonials, sports/fitness, and of course weird/funny videos subjects like “baby sloths” or “cute cats”.
Make Your Video
- Obviously the quality of your video is important. Viewers will need to find the information relevant, useful and worth watching. YouTube ranks videos base on their views, social shares, subscribes, watch-time, etc. So just because you optimize a video properly, doesn’t mean it will rank or do you any good if it isn’t worthwhile for the viewer.
- For video creation you can go all out, hire a professional videographer, editor, and rent a studio for the day, shoot a simple video yourself with a video camera, phone, or webcam, or even just make a PowerPoint presentation and record your voice-over with a program like ScreenCast-O-Matic on the cheap.
- The longer the video, the better. YouTube and Google reward longer videos in the rankings. Try to make your video at least 5 minutes long.
Optimize & Upload
- Once your keyword research and video creation are complete, the YouTube optimization truly begins. Just like you want to have your url include your keyword on a website, you also should have your keyword included in the video filename.
- The video title should also include your keyword, preferably in the first part of the video title. Your video’s title should be at least 5 words long so as to avoid keyword stuffing in the title.
- The description is also a key determining factor when it comes to YouTube Optimization. The description is how YouTube and Google understand the content of your video (along with the title).
- Place a link to your website at the very top of the description and include the keyword within the first 25 words. The description should be at minimum 250 words with the keyword appearing around 3-4 times.
- Don’t forget to add tags describing what your visit is about – these aren’t super vital but help your video show up in the “related videos” section of other similar videos.
Share, Share, Share
- The final step is to start getting views! The more views you get, the better your video will rank – but they have to be real views!
- Share your video on blog posts, on social media, link to your videos in your email signature, and mention your video on Quora, Yahoo! Answers and other popular Q&A sites.