YouTube is an indispensable marketing tool; it’s not just for uploading useless videos of your dog dressed up in your grandma’s underpants… Whether you’re a musician or whether you run a small eCommerce website, YouTube is a powerful and essential tool for marketing and promoting anything you want in your line of business.
For me, YouTube has become one of the most resourceful tools for generating traffic to my art website, and more recently for increasing traffic to my blog and helping me achieve some affiliate marketing success.
Whilst YouTube is a powerful marketing platform, it has also become a saturated one too. More and more videos being uploaded means tough competition and getting your videos noticed can prove a real challenge at times, so it’s best that you understand the importance of promoting your YouTube Videos.
Optimizing your YouTube Videos
So how do you effectively optimize your YouTube videos to ensure that it receives the most amounts of views possible? In this short post we’re going to look at some all-essential SEO tips for improving the visibility of your videos on YouTube.
1. Optimizing your Video Title
Let’s start with the title, and this is essentially important if you want people to find your videos using specific keywords, so ensuring your keyword or key phrase appears at the beginning of your video title is important.
For example if I was going to create a video on painting tips using acrylics, my target keywords might be ‘Acrylic painting tips,’ so I’ll ensure this is present at the start of my SEO title for my video. Here is an example:
‘Best Acrylic Painting Tips – Landscapes Acrylic Painting Tips for Beginners.’ As you can see my focus keywords are at the beginning and are also mentioned again in the title, this is effective however remember not to over stuff your SEO title with too many keywords.
2. Add Texts and Captions in your Video Content
Don’t forget when you’re adding texts and captions in your videos to also add your keywords in them. This will greatly help to improve the search rank of your videos.
3. Video Description
Again when you’re writing your unique video description, start with your keyword or your key phrase… So the keywords for my example video I used earlier being ‘Acrylic Painting Tips’ is used followed by my video description. You might also want to add your keyword or key phrase again in the body of your description.
4. Add a Link to your Video in your Description
Another useful little YouTube SEO tip I want to share with you is, to copy and paste the link (URL) to your video into the description itself. What this will do is create a backlink to your video each time your video is book marked on a social socially, or embedded on another site or blog.
5. Promote more Likes on your Videos
Get your social connections including your family members, college friends, your landlord or anyone else you can get hold of to like your videos on YouTube. Get as many thumbs up as possible. If you run a blog, write a short post kindly asking for readers to give you the thumbs up on your latest video, you can also embed the video in the post itself.
6. Promote sharing of your Videos across Social Networking Sites
Don’t forget that social media now has an immense roll to play in how we perform SEO. Share your videos using social bookmarking tools like Digg, StumbleUpon, Pinterest, and social networking sites like Facebook and Google+. Also since YouTube is owned by Google, you can also encourage viewers to give your video a plus one rating.
7. Choose the Correct Category
It’s important to choose the right category for your video. Avoid choosing non related categories just because you think you’re going to get more popularity from it. Besides choosing unrelated categories will only confuse potential viewers and you may also run the risk of having your video removed by YouTube.
