With more than one billion active users, YouTube is the world’s largest and most widely used video sharing website. The Google-owned and operated site is available in 75 countries and 61 languages. Business owners can use this to their advantage by marketing their products and services here. However, you’ll want to perform some basic search engine optimization (SEO) on your marketing videos to encourage higher rankings.
Video Title and Description
The single most important SEO element of a YouTube video – well, two elements – is the title and description. When a user searches for a video, whether it’s on Google Search or YouTube, he or she will notice the titles within the listings. Try to include the keyword for which you are trying to rank in title. Also, avoid using long, drawn out titles, as simple ones tend to work better. YouTube videos should have relevant, eye-catching titles that make users want to click. Follow this same formula with your video’s description, using a relevant but slightly longer description.
Note: YouTube has a 100 character limit for video titles and 5,000 character limit for descriptions.
Tags
Don’t forget to add relevant tags to your YouTube videos. YouTube allows the use of 120-characters-or-less tags to help determine where and how videos should rank. If you published a video on dog training, for instance, you may want to include tags like “how to train your dog,” “dog training tips,” “dog obedience,” “teach a dog,” etc. They can be added either when you initially upload the video or afterwords. Add your tags in order of importance/relevance, with primary keywords first, for maximum SEO benefit.
Include a Transcript
Why should you add a transcript to your YouTube video? You have to remember that search engines, and YouTube, are unable to “read” the audio spoken in videos. Therefore, they rely on other signals to determine where and how the video should rank. Including a text-based transcript of your video helps search engines perform this job, as it details everything that was spoken. You can learn more about the use of transcripts in YouTube videos by visiting https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2734799?hl=en.
Embed
Once your video has been uploaded to YouTube, click on the Share button followed by Embed to copy the embed code to your clipboard. You can then paste this code into your website, blog, and other online properties so visitors on these sites can watch it. Not only will this drive direct traffic to your video, but it will also encourage higher search rankings. Several studies have found a direct correlation between the number of embeds a video has and its search ranking.
