Did you really know that YouTube is the second biggest search engine platform after Google? As a Google product, YouTube has climbed to the top with over 5 billion videos being viewed every day and a staggering 60 hours of video getting uploaded every minute. Uploading and marketing your videos on YouTube can help give your content visibility in both YouTube and Google search.
A YouTube channel serves as a hub for all your companies video content, allowing you to present your product, service or mission to a platform that sees over 800 million unique users visit every month. Today we’ll explore four ways to optimize your YouTube channel to ensure your videos are being discovered, watched and shared by looking at examples from existing trend-setters.
Optimize Your Videos Metadata
What is metadata you ask? Metadata is all the data you enter about a video to help obviously characterize the subject of a video. In terms of YouTube, the metadata makes up the title, descriptions and keywords of your videos.
Optimizing these key segments of your video content will help rank your videos in both Google and YouTube. It’s important to note that content is king – if your video is the type of content your audience wants to see then these optimizations will help further a video’s reach. In the event that your video content stinks, then optimizing your metadata is going to do very little to extend its visibility.
Title Your Video Correctly
Write a concise, descriptive title using key phrases that people would search to find your video. Be as natural as possible, but also incorporate YouTube’s Keyword Suggestion Tool as an approximation of how much global monthly traffic a particular key phrase receives. Make sure you choose “exact match” when doing keyword research with this tool.
Make Use of Your Video’s Description
Each of your videos should have a lengthy description of what the video’s content is all about. In this case, you could have been lengthier in its description of this video but nonetheless they describe the contents of the video using similar keywords they used in the title.
Add Keywords(tags) to Your Videos
Adding ten to twenty tags per video is an ideal way to make use of keywords relevant to your video but that couldn’t naturally fit in your title or description. Each tag should be a word or phrase (use mostly phrases), that are relevant to the content of the video as well as the ways in which you predict users would discover such a video.
Add Category to Your Videos
Once you upload a video, you can categorize it under “Advanced settings.” Choosing a category is another way to group your video with similar content on YouTube.
It might not be as simple as it looks. In fact, YouTube’s Creator Academy suggests that marketers go through a comprehensive process to determine which category each video belongs in.
Add closed captions to tell YouTube more about your content
YouTube’s closed caption system makes it far easier for hearing impaired people to enjoy your content. It also gives YouTube more information about your videos by converting audio content – typically spoken content – into words that can be used to assess your video’s subject matter.
Closed captions are a YouTube search ranking factor, and adding them to your videos is a great way to strengthen your SEO and increase the likelihood of your videos appearing for their target keywords in YouTube search.
Promote your video outside of YouTube to create popularity
Because YouTube hosts all of its video content, it has access to a far wider range of data points than Google, which largely relies on links, social activity and other third party metrics to assess the value and popularity of a page.
This means that YouTube can easily determine the most popular video on any subject simply by looking at its view count relative to similar videos.
When YouTube first launched, video views were its top ranking factor. Today, while views aren’t the top ranking factor for video content, they’re still an important part of setting your video apart as an authoritative piece of content for its keywords.
Puneet Singh SEO | The Blogger 