Optimizing Your YouTube Videos for Search Engines

It is common knowledge that online video marketing should be an essential part of your social media marketing campaign and your online videos must be optimized for search engines in the same way as your other online content.

Interestingly enough, one piece of helpful advice that the experts don’t seem to share often is about learning to use SEO techniques in your online video marketing campaigns. If a video marketing campaign is truly effective, often it has a way of going viral, which is exactly what you want when it comes to your marketing campaign.

“How to” videos are a sure way to increase your website traffic. It is an excellent idea to include a call to action toward the end of your video to draw people to your website. You can include the call to action right in the thumbnail of the video.

Once you have optimized your video, you should embed it in your website. It is a good idea to have a separate page on your website for every video that you share with your viewers. Make sure that you have good-quality keywords connected to that video. You should be consistent regarding your description of the videos and post the same one on Yahoo! Video, YouTube and Google Video or any other video website that you use.

High-quality video SEO advice

When you begin to upload a video on a video website, such as YouTube, a form will appear with some choices for you to make. You will type in your video title and you will give a short description of the video as well as tags in the tags column. When it comes to video SEO, those are the three most important pieces of information. Once a person searches for your video, you will be able to see the results with the keywords that will appear in bold in the “Title” and “Description” columns of the results.

It is also very important to use the same link-building techniques as you do with your website and blog with video marketing. One good way to work in a link to your video is to encourage other bloggers to put it in their blog postings. You will find that there are many who will be happy to do it.

Choosing keywords for your video

You need to choose the most attractive and the most appropriate keywords to promote your online video. Before you can choose the best keywords for your video, you need to do some research to know which words are the best for your purposes.

• Begin by listing words that you feel are the most closely connected to your video in the text editor.
   
• Either open a tab or a new window in your browser and go to YouTube.com.
   
• Open another tab or window and go to YouTube’s Ads Keywords Tool.
   
• Choose one keyword or key phrase and copy and paste it into the YouTube.com search bar and click on “search.”
   
• Then, go to the tab that you opened in the Ad Keywords Tool. The tool gives you the ability to target a specific country and language. Your default is the “United States.” Next, you will type your keyword in the box and click on “Get keyword ideas.”
   
• In your results, you will see the number of times your keyword or key phrase (in other words, search term) is searched on average in a month. After that, you should go to your search results from your search on YouTube.com.
   
• You can determine what and who you are up against by reading the number of results that are returned (in the top right hand corner) based on your search term and the number of people who used the same search term in the titles and descriptions of their videos.
   
• A good way to reduce your number of competitors and reach more viewers is by combining keywords. Your new keyword combinations will make them unique. This will make your keywords more valuable and will bring you more valuable viewers as well.
   
• Once you have completed your search, it is a good idea to go over your keywords again to determine if you have forgotten any. Additionally, you can use related search words, which you will see below the results of your search. You will find those suggestions to be helpful.
   
• Another great way to get people to notice your video is to put your website link in the video. If your video is lengthy, you may want to seriously consider dividing your video into short segments. You will, in effect, be creating a series of videos that will entice people and not only interest them in continuing to tune in until they have seen your entire video but also in compelling them to visit your website.

Conclusion

Online video marketing is an extremely important part of your social media marketing campaign. Optimizing your video’s title and description will give you the results that you are looking for: more viewers, more subscribers to your video, and eventually, more targeted and prequalified website traffic.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. Please contact us at CompuKol Communications for further discussion on how we might be able to assist you and your team.