Open The Gates For VIDEO MARKETING 5 WORKING SEO TIPS YOU MUST FOLLOW FOR HIGHER RANKING YOUTUBE VIDEOS By Using These Simple Tips
It's no secret that YouTube is a source of traffic with almost unlimited potential.
There is only one problem:
It is a very busy place. In fact, according to YouTube, there are more than 100 hours of video uploaded to the site every minute.
Considering the deluge of content that you have to compete on YouTube, the obvious question is: "How do you get people to watch YOUR video instead of the millions of others?"
The answer? Video SEO.
I bet most of your competition lazily loads your videos and expects one of them to become "viral". Needless to say, this rarely (or never) works.
But if you take the time to optimize your videos for SEO, you will get much more traffic than your competitors.
Let's jump right on.
A brief summary of YouTube SEO
Before delving into how you can use to optimize your videos for YouTube, let's review some of the most important ranking factors that YouTube uses.
It's not as complex as the famous 200 Google ranking signals, but the YouTube algorithm is not a joke. It takes into account dozens of signals to classify the videos in the YouTube search and for the suggested videos
I know there's a lot of information to process, so let me give you the Cliff Notes of the most important signals YouTube uses:
Title tag information
Audience retention
Keywords in the description tag
Labels
Video length
Number of subscribers after viewing
Comments
Likes and dislikes
With that, it's time to show you five ways you can take advantage of these signals to get more traffic to your videos and, ultimately, to your site.
1. Write super long video descriptions
Remember that YouTube and Google cannot see or listen to your video (yet).
That means they rely heavily on the text surrounding the video to understand the subject of their video.
Why is this crime like that?
Well, the more you know YouTube about your video, the more confident you can classify it according to your target keyword.
But the most important thing is that YouTube uses keywords in the description to classify it by super long tail keywords.
For example, I posted a video on YouTube a few months ago called "SEO Strategy 2014: How to classify in Google Today". My description of that video is 291 words. Almost a full blog post, really.
That long description, along with some other techniques that I will show later, helped the video to quickly rank according to its target keyword, "SEO strategy" (currently number three on YouTube).
But it is also classified for several long-tail keywords, such as "SEO infographic strategy" (number one) because the keyword-rich description includes words such as "infographic" and "SEO strategy":
In short: make sure the descriptions of your videos have at least 200 words.
2. Optimize around "video keywords"
Ranking on YouTube is excellent, but ranking your video on YouTube and Google is even better.
Although Google gives YouTube videos an inherent advantage in SERPs, that's only true for certain keywords.
These keywords are called "Video Keywords" because they tend to have video results on the first page of Google.
For example, any keyword that includes "cute cats" will almost always have some video results:
This makes a lot of sense if you think about it.
Someone looking for "cute cats" does not want to read an article like, "10 reasons why cats are so cute". They want to see cute cats playing, eating and sleeping!
On the other hand, someone looking for "ankle sprain" wants to read about symptoms and treatments. Google knows this and shows those users a block of 10 text articles:
Conclusion: Before deciding a keyword for your video, check if there are video results on the first page. If so, that's a keyword that you should seriously consider because you can potentially get your classified video on Google and YouTube.
3. Get More Video Views through online communities
Online communities such as the Quora and LinkedIn groups are great places to channel traffic.
The thing is that most communities do not take too well someone to drop links to their content all over the place.
But they are generally open to people who share useful YouTube videos, like yours.
Because the quantity and quality of your video views is one of the most important rating factors on YouTube, getting the wonders of the selected communities works wonders.
Simply find a question in the community that your video can help answer. Then, provide some value and suggest that people watch your video if they want more information:
In short: share your video generously in online communities. This will connect your video with the kind of high retention and quality views that YouTube likes to see.
4. Encourage subscription and link
Because the YouTube algorithm does not use backlinks, it puts LOTS of weight on user experience signals. If people enjoy watching your video, expect it to crush you in the YouTube search.
Subscribe and like are two of the most important signals of the user experience that YouTube uses.
When someone likes your video enough to subscribe after watching it, send a strong message to YouTube that says you have a killer video in your hands.
Tastes are much less important, but they still count.
It can increase both signals from the user's experience by asking.
At the end of your video, give people a call to action that encourages them to subscribe.
Marie Forleo, a YouTube marketing teacher, asks people to subscribe at the end of each video:
And I'm sure that its smooth push has contributed to its multiple top-page YouTube ratings and 93,000 subscribers.
In short: ask people who like, comment and subscribe to each video.
5. Create keyword-rich playlists
Do not leave your YouTube channel a disorganized mess.
One of the easiest ways to get more YouTube search traffic in your videos is to organize your videos into playlists.
A keyword-rich playlist gives YouTube more detailed information about the subject of your video. And as we saw with its description, more content based on text = more views.
For example, FitnessBlender, which gets more than 100,000 views in each video, has its channel organized neatly into categories rich in keywords:
In a nutshell: once you have 10 videos on your YouTube channel, organize them into thematic playlists.
