3 Steps for Better YouTube Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization is frequently referred to with reference to a website. The term itself implies that your site is search engine friendly in that it can be easily indexed by search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing. However search engine optimization also applies to your social networking profiles such as your Facebok Profile, Twitter account, LinkedIn profile, and also to your YouTube channel. The concept is thus to make your social networking accounts optimized so that when people go looking for your account via a search engine or even from within the same social network itself, they can easily find you. The term that coins this concept is thus, social media optimization.

Step 1: Tag Your Content

One of the easiest ways to dramatically increase the likelihood that your video will be easily found on YouTube is to include as many relevant tags as possible for each video that you upload. “Tags” is simply a fancy way to say keyword and is important for helping search engine robots to find your video. Without relevant video tags one of the only ways for your video to be indexed by YouTube is via the title of the video.

Step 2: Carefully Choose Your Video Title

The single most important video tag is the title that you give your video. Many people spend a great deal of time creating video content, editing footage, adding in music and video effects, and then spend all of 30 seconds deciding on a name for their video once they have uploaded it to their YouTube channel.

When you are choosing a title for a video it is highly recommended that you use Google’s keyword tool to research what keyword phrases have the highest search volume related to your video topic. Ever since Google bought YouTube the search engine giant has begun indexing video content as relevant material for search results. In other words you can come across a YouTube video while using Google to conduct a search on “Lebron James Chokes”.

What does it mean for you as the owner of your own YouTube channel? It means several things but foremost it means you can use Google’s Keyword tool to discover the keyword terms people are using most frequently to look for material related to your video. After which you can use those exact keywords in the title of your video to increase your chances that your video will populate as a search result.

For instance lets you put together video footage from the 2011 NBA finals when the Miami Heat were playing the eventual champion Dallas Mavericks. And lets say your video is mostly composed of Lebron James highlights from the game you attended. What should you name this video to ensure it is most search engine friendly? Using Google’s keyword tool you can try out several potential video titles and choose the one which is most popular. A screen shot demonstrates below.

*** As you can see the first phrase, “Lebron James in Finals” has more monthly searches than the other two potential video titles and thus should be used for the title of your video. (Or should at least guide you to a similar title)

Step 3: YouTube Advertising

After you have carefully added tags and chosen a title for your YouTube video it is time that you start collecting views. Having a high number of video views is extremely important for your video’s rank position in YouTube. Notice when you conduct a search on YouTube how the videos on the first page of results often have thousands if not millions of views. Simply put YouTube recognizes that a video with a high number of views must have good content and thus should be top result in that it is more likely to satisfy what the viewer is searching for. Therefore it is important that your video collect as many views as possible as quickly as possible.

But how do you get a video to collect thousands of views if you have just recently uploaded it to YouTube and it is contending against many other similar videos that have been in the YouTube library for years? You advertise your video.

Advertising a brand new video on YouTube is the easiest way to collect a ton of views very quickly so that your video’s organic search ranking will increase. The strategy is simply to “pump the primer”. Advertise your video until the number of views is high enough that you are contending with other related videos on the first page of YouTube for your topic. Then you can ease up on the ads and let your organic video ranking “do the work for you” and collect views on its own.

Oh but the strategies for optimizing your YouTube channel continue on past these three tips. Or do they? Please share with us in the comment section below your favorite strategy for your video channel!