An article by Skylark Media Group
YouTube is now the 2nd largest search engine in the world so it makes a lot of sense to understand how to optimise your videos for You Tube. A well optimised You Tube video is one of the best ways to get high organic search engine rankings. So how do you do it?
1. Cunning Backwards Engineering
Start with your keyword search terms. What are your customers looking for? Is it advice that you can give? Is it a service your company offers? Is it a local initiative? Make a video about what your customers want and they’ll be delighted to watch it. Do your research for some niche terms within your industry – that will really cut down on the competition.
2. Titles & Descriptions
Once you have your keywords ready I like to follow a fairly similar format for all my titles and descriptions. Keep the title long, start with your keywords then add a sub clause. So for Skylark Media Group’s showreel the title reads: ‘Video production Bristol – effective business communications with video’ (start and end with your main keyword)
Description – Here we recommend following best practices for SEO copy writing. It’s debatable whether or not you should lead with a link to your website. Obviously the exposure for your URL is great, but then again it takes away from the characters you have to compel the user to view. I suggest trying both ways and see what works best for you. You definitely want to use several “related” terms that are highly relevant to your keyword. Don’t keyword stuff and make sure to write the content in a compelling manner that drives the user to take action. This description is what the user will see before viewing your video, so write it for the user and not for the search engine.
Tags – Just like with a blog post you can add tags to your videos. I recommend sticking to around 5-10 tags for each video.
Skylark Media Group’s showreel
3. Annotations
The Annotations Editor is a You Tube tool that lets you layer text, hotspots and links over your video, thus enriching your viewers’ experience with information, interactivity and engagement.
4. Captions
This is the tool you can use to associate your script with your video. This is a powerful way to get all those valuable search terms that are contained in the script into a searchable file.
5. Identify Link Partners
You need to establish some links to your video to boost the video SEO. You could write a blog around your video content and then link to the video in your post. With such quality content as a video you can usually find some established blog owners who would welcome a guest blog post.
6. Relevance
Last but not least, give YouTube and Google some additional relevance as to what your video is about. Hopefully you’ve chosen some link partners that are relevant in site content but there is another way to build relevance. Use the Video Reply option in YouTube to simply associate your video with other related videos. Since this is a somewhat “spammy” technique, I only recommend replying to 1-2 videos at most.
So there you go. Video is very powerful SEO tool that can boost your position on organic search engine rankings. When you upload your video to You Tube, follow the steps above to get maximum advantage. If you’d like any advice, please get in touch.