Most mention of the word ‘SEO’ appears in relation to the typed word; notably, how to increase readers of a particular blog post or website.
Yet SEO is also relevant to video content, especially on YouTube, where every minute, users collectively post up 100 hours of video. With such popularity, it’s important that you make and upload your videos in such a way that they will appear higher in the site’s search results. And if you have spent a large part of your marketing budget creating video, the imperative only becomes more emphatic. Here are three key tips, courtesy of Searchenginewatch.com and ReelSeo.com:
1. Write full video descriptions
YouTube hasn’t yet gained the ability to discern what videos contain by examining each file. Instead, creators have the option to upload text descriptions along with their clips, and it’s here you should be as frank as you can. Essentially, the more you tell YouTube about your video, the more confidently it will rank it against any given search term.
2. Share everywhere
YouTube will reward your video in the search result if plenty of people view it. So sharing an embedded link to your video in off-site message rooms and online chats will help drive that initial traffic to your video. And then, who knows? Hopefully the YouTube algorithm will recognise that your clip is popular and bump you up the search results, meaning yet more views.
3. Think quality
Gaining a top ranking is not just about clicks; it’s also about how long people look at your video, according to ReelSeo. It suggests:
When a person makes a search query on YouTube, the longer they watch the resulting video, the more favourably it will appear in similar search results the next time.
As with Google, Bing and other search engines, YouTube is constantly working on its search algorithm, meaning that for content creators, there really is only one abiding principle to follow. As suggested by Christos Goodrow, the key is to:
Make compelling content and be honest about what it is with the viewers. Gaming the system can pay dividends in the short run, but if a creator is going to be making content for the long haul, eventually the algorithm will catch up with them.
