Even though YouTube is not a tool that is a perfect fit and can be used by every type of company or site for promotion, there are features of this tremendously popular website that can be used by just about anyone for promotion. In case you didn’t know, YouTube is actually the second largest search engine right behind Google, so the traffic is tremendous.
This fact alone makes YouTube the perfect place for marketing professional to sink their teeth in and try to find a way to promote their brand or site via the video format. Essentially, optimizing your YouTube channel involves the same basic rules as any other type of search engine optimization (SEO). It’s all about content and linking, and it’s mostly about making your YouTube page very easy to find.
Here are five essential SEO tips for optimizing your YouTube channel.
Create strong titles
Obviously, titles are very important because they show up in the search engine results pages. While you should be focused on getting all your main keywords in, you should also pay attention to making the title interesting and worth of clicking on and watching. Be sure to put all of your important keywords at the beginning though, because only the first 50 characters appear in the universal search. It is also a good idea to include the word “video” in the title if at all possible, because that’s what people will be searching for if they are doing a Google search for a video.
Make the most out of every descriptive area
On YouTube the same rules don’t really apply as far as descriptions looking like spam. You should really try to use just about every descriptive field you can to its absolute potential. In the case of YouTube, more is definitely better. You can include a bunch of links to your sites and other relevant sites that you want to promote in the video description, and it is also a good idea to paste a transcript of the video into the description as well. For example, if it is a tutorial video with a script, feel free to paste a transcript of the tutorial in there, because it is yet another great way to get a lot of your keywords in. Feel free to go crazy with tags, as long as you keep them relevant and do not duplicate them.
Use closed captions to your advantage
Many people are not even aware that there is a closed captions option available on YouTube. Since it’s such a global medium, it’s only natural that YouTube decided to offer people the opportunity to caption their videos in case the people who are watching it do not understand the language that the video is in. Luckily, YouTube crawls the content in the captions, so that is yet another place to include key phrases and words. Captions were a pain to include earlier, but since then, YouTube has improved the technology, making it a breeze to do. All you have to do is enter in a script now, and it will sync with the video thanks to YouTube’s new speech recognition technology.
Make use of annotations as well
Annotations are great because you can use them to create links within your video to other videos or other aspects of your YouTube presence, like your playlists or channels. You can also use annotations to make your videos more interesting with subtitles, descriptions and notes, or use them to make your videos more interactive and encourage people to comment or rate your videos and subscribe to your channel.
Create channel playlists
Essentially, the most important reason for using a playlist is because it enables you to get yourself to appear in search results more than once. The playlists are indexed separately from the individual videos, so you can use each separate playlist to either promote a separate set of keywords or intensify your efforts to get more people coming to your channel and watching your videos.
Using these methods, you will not only be able to increase the number of views that your videos are getting and the number of subscribers your channel has, but you will also be able to promote whatever it is you are promoting otherwise in a new and very effective way through generally the same SEO principles you have been using for all of your other Internet marketing efforts.
About the Author:
David Lazar is a blogger at CometDocs.com. With a background in journalism, he enjoys writing about and following a variety of topics, including careers, education, technology and new media.