Are you using videos to promote your products, services and/or brand? If not, you should. According to a report published by ZenithOptimedia, online video viewing increased 23.3% in 2015. Assuming it stays on its current course, it will likely increase by another 19.8% in 2016.
Choose Your Target Keyword
The first step in optimizing a video for higher search rankings is to choose your target keyword. In other words, for what keyword or keywords are you hoping to rank? If you are publishing a video in which you review a product, then maybe your target keyword is “[product name] + review.” Ideally, your target keyword should consist of three elements: relevancy, high traffic and low competition. This is the recipe for SEO success, so try sticking to this format when optimizing your videos.
If you need help with keyword selection, run some ideas through Google’s Keyword Planner tool. This free-to-use tool is great for uncovering target keywords, as it reveals key data like traffic and competition.
Publish High-Quality Videos
This may sound like common sense, but it’s still worth mentioning that you should publish high-quality videos, not just generic, low-quality videos. High-quality videos will receive more pageviews, shares, longer average view times, and other signals of viewer engagement. Search engines will then take all of these factors into account when determining where and how to rank your videos.
Build Links
Search engines use hundreds of different signals as part of their ranking algorithms. Among the most influential, however, is backlinks. So if you’re trying to achieve a top search ranking for a video, focus on building more backlinks pointing to your video. You can create backlinks by posting links on social media, forums, blogs, or even your own website. Just remember to avoid paying for backlinks, as this could have the opposite effect by hurting your SEO efforts instead of helping.
YouTube Optimization Tips
Being that YouTube is currently ranked as the world’s second largest search engine, you should upload your videos here. See below for some tips on how to take full advantage of YouTube.
Here are some tips to achieve higher search rankings on YouTube:
- Enable embedding. Allowing other users to embed your video on their website will increase pageviews, which subsequently encourages higher search rankings.
- Enable ratings. Even if you receive some “poor” ratings from viewers, studies have shown that videos with ratings enabled tend to rank higher.
- Enable comments. Like ratings, allowing viewers to comment on your videos can increase their search rankings.
- Create a detailed description. Although optional, adding a detailed description to your YouTube videos will give search engines stuff to crawl; thus, encouraging higher search rankings.
- Include keywords as “tags” for your YouTube video.
