Beginning with Google’s purchase of YouTube in 2006 the video service has increasingly become an integral part of any good SEO plan. According to Avinash Kaushik, Co-founder of Google, 85% of the US Population has watched a YouTube video.
Therefore, I thought it would be helpful to create a guide to my best practices for optimizing videos for uploading to YouTube. This practical guide to producing optimized video material will hopefully garner the SEO boost you are looking for. Let me know if you have any specific questions in the comments section!
1. Do your Research! Before you even consider creating video content ask yourself these very important questions:
- What is the most interesting way to present my brand/message in video format? YouTube considers a video “viewed” after 8 seconds. Make sure your video is interesting enough to get the viewer past this “hump”.
- What are the top keywords that I want to boost with my video?
- Do I have the time and resources to devote to keeping up a YouTube membership/channel?
2. Once you have decided to move forward and you have outlined your video strategy and content, it is time to get down to the nitty gritty. Optimizing your YouTube video for SEO:
- Title (99 character limit) – Use your top keywords within the first 3-5 words of the video title.
- Category – Choose the best possible and most general category for your video (i.e. People & Blogs).
- Tags – Use your well researched keywords as tags for the video but limit yourself to no more than 10.
- Description – Use your keywords in the copy of your description, include a link to a related website landing page, request viewers rank & share your video.
- Transcript – Create a transcript of your video for Closed Caption purpose. This can be very time consuming but well worth the extra effort as they are critical to ranking well in YouTube!
- Press Releases
- Facebook fan page
- Twitter feed
- Embed on website pages (where applicable)
- Monitor the video comments & respond to viewers.
- View, rank and comment on other YouTube videos.
- Link with other related videos by creating Playlists.
