3 SEO Tips for YouTube Videos

YouTube is today the world’s second biggest search engine. It has a huge untapped traffic source. It boasts of over a whopping 30 million visitors each day. Below are three simple, yet very effective strategies on how to optimize your YouTube videos for Google and YouTube rankings. 


Find Video Keywords

Just like anything that has to do with SEO, you need to do keyword research. The goal here is to find the keywords whose results feature on Google’s first page. These ones are called video keywords. Optimizing your video for keywords that do not have any video results in Google will mean that you will only get traffic from people who will be searching on YouTube. Conversely, if you correctly optimize for video keywords, then you will get targeted traffic coming to your video directly from the first page of Google.

The best way to find the much-needed video keywords is to conduct a search for keywords specifically in your niche. After finding the keywords, use Google’s Keyword Planner to find out whether the keyword has enough search volume every month. The threshold that the search volume of any specific video keyword should meet to qualify as enough is usually three hundred searches every month. If a keyword gets at least three hundred searches per month, then that means it gets decent amount of searches in YouTube itself.


High Quality Videos

The most useful YouTube ranking signal is user engagement. No matter how much you try to optimize your video for search engines, if it is a poor quality video, then it will not rank. YouTube judges your video usually based on how YouTube users interact with it. And how does YouTube know this?


There is a range of metrics that YouTube uses to determine if your video is of high quality or of low quality. For example, it considers video retention, comments, people who subscribe after watching, how many people share your videos across social media sites, how many people favorite your video, and how people use the thumbs up and thumbs down feature. You can agree that these things will reveal a lot about the quality of your video. Therefore, produce high quality videos that will enamor users to your videos, and your users will thank you in kind.


Description

The YouTube video description is very important. Google and YouTube usually rely on the text description of your video to determine the video’s content in order to rank it. You should describe your video mindful of the following:

--Put your link at the topmost area of the video.

--The description should be at least 250 words.

--The first twenty five words of the description should contain the keyword.

--Include the keyword 3-4 times in the description.

Equally important are tags, video title, and video filename. Use them with SEO in mind.

If you do these things well, you will see an exponential growth in the numbers of your audience as you will rank well both in Google and in YouTube itself.