How to optimise videos on YouTube
Do you know how to optimise the videos you post on Youtube? Videos, wherever you are positing them, should be helping you to drive visitors to your website or your online content hub as part of your video marketing. They should be driving traffic to the place where you are able to capture the details of your prospects and those who are interested in your product or service, so that they can drop into that all-important sales funnel you have created for your business (you have, haven’t you?? If not, take a step back and work on your Market, Message, Media planning because that is what defines the content you will need…)
Videos help you deliver your content in the most satisfying and consumable way for your prospects and customers. Your videos need to be about driving traffic to your website and of course they should improve the experience of the consumer – the viewer – in some way.
Are you using YouTube properly?
It’s no good just commissioning a video production company to make you a website video though – you need to ensure your are publishing videos on YouTube and other relevant video sites, and that they are optimised so that they can be found by our friends, the search engines. This is where SEO comes in. YouTube is the second largest search engine after Google so it makes a lot of sense to upload your business videos on YouTube if you want to get found, does it not?
For a YouTube video to rank well on search engines you need both on-page and off-page SEO. Let’s start with On page SEO for YouTube videos:
On Page SEO on YouTube
Your video title and description needs to be optimised to rank for the keywords that you have identified as relevant for your business. The video title needs to be interesting enough to encourage click throughs and it does need to include that all important keyword. You have 66 characters – after that Google will shorten the title in its search, so get your keyword in the first 66 characters of the YouTube video title.
The description – it needs to be relevant to the video content of course – if you trick people into watching your video with deceit and lies they will exit pretty quickly and no-one benefits from that . You will certainly not register a video “view” for instance and you may encourage a “dislike” or an angsty comment unless you’ve disabled those – and if you’re looking for maximum exposure that’s not a good idea either! Don’t stuff the description with keyword terms for the sake of it – the description needs to give value to the viewer and the ranking will come naturally if you’ve been intelligent about it.
We recommend including your website or online page URL at the beginning of the video description. We also like to reiterate the call to action in the description – tell the viewer what you’d like them to do in the text as well as in the video. Of course, you can add annotations and links into the video itself if it’s appropriate.
Don’t forget to add relevant tags – YouTube will suggest some anyway but they aren’t often the right ones – so remove any suggestions you don’t like and add the ones you do! Simply start typing in the tag box and return after each tag. We like to add at least 5 tags per video but if more are relevant, add them!
YouTube selects the “related videos” which it shows on the side of the main video based on the tags that have been given to the video – those videos with similar or relevant tags to the one being watched will be highlighted so it’s a great way to get your video seen by more people who are interested in the subject matter.
Tomorrow we’ll talk about how you maximise your off page SEO with your YouTube videos.
Read more at http://www.business2community.com/seo/how-to-optimize-youtube-videos-for-seo-0382566#1ubs0DJKp5LQ7u5S.99
