Businesses who are using videos to sell their products and build brand awareness are finding good homes for them on a number of popular video platforms. YouTube still seems to outshine the competition with more engagement of total embedded linked videos. But as we know, simply uploading a video to YouTube will not guarantee that it will be found in search results even if it’s the best video on the topic. Videos like all other web content need to be optimized for search. In this post, we’ll explore some tried and true tactics for helping your videos receive the rankings they deserve.

A Look at YouTube Optimization

Mark Robertson of ReelSeo.com says in his post, How to Optimize YouTube Videos “The best piece of advice that I can give for optimizing video on YouTube, is that, it is NOT about metadata and text alone. It is no longer enough to rely on titles, descriptions, and tags for getting videos ranked. This may still work for very long-tail keyword queries, but there are now many different YouTube ranking factors, both on-page and off-site.

YouTube optimization, especially for competitive keyword phrases is about a combination of 1) creating quality, compelling video content 2) publishing using SEO best practices, and 3) engaging with the community, both within as well as outside of YouTube.”

Tina Fotopoulou suggests 10 Tips for Optimizing YouTube Videos:

1. Be original and create interesting videos
2. Keep to suggested video lengths, between 2 and 4 minutes
3. Upload high resolution videos when your presentation includes slides
4. Watermark your video with your domain name, contact information
5. Create a YouTube account and add links and use appropriate themes and colors
6. Focus on adding description, title and tags
7. Use captions/subtitles in your video so people who don’t speak your language can watch them
8. Include a URL on the top of the description
9. Build a video library, activate comments, rates and favorites through your channel
10. Create a channel with multiple videos

Don’t just optimize, boost Your SEO
Mitchell Harper in his post, How To: Boost Your SEO with a YouTube Channel further expands on the suggestions listed above with a great example of how to craft your YouTube video descriptions. I took a look at the YouTube Channel for his company, BigCommerce, where you can see how he optimizes his videos by putting the name of his business in the video title, including a link at the beginning of the description, using keywords to appropriately describe your video, including a good number of tags, and specifying a category.

Let’s take a look now at one of his videos to see exactly how Mitchell does it:

In this first example you can see how he has included the name of his company in the title

In the second example you can see how he has included a URL to his website at the beginning of the description, includes a category, and adds 15 tags including the name of the business.

And in the third example you can see how the results appear in Google.

Promote your YouTube Video to Enhance SEO
Be sure to include links to your YouTube videos from your website, blog and other social networking channels. If you’re not going to promote them, who will? Consider too putting calls to actions in your videos e.g. sign up for our e-newsletter, check out our upcoming webinars.

Remember that each time your video is viewed from an outside source it will still count as a view so do the most you can to gain external traffic for your video. If Google has to make a choice between videos to list for a popular keyword the ones that have the most views have a much better chance of being listed.

Are your videos getting the traffic they deserve? It’s never too late, go back and optimize existing ones on YouTube and for new videos you upload try these SEO tips.