How to Optimize your YouTube Video for SEO
As you market your product or service, is your business using video as a marketing tool? If your answer is no, millions of potential customers are missing out on what you have to offer. The addition of image and video results has increased SEO value drastically since Google started adding ‘blended’ results to a search result page. It’s important to note however, that just by uploading a video on YouTube is not a 100% guarantee of increased traffic. Very much like other content on the web, your video needs to be SEO-friendly.
So how do you make your video SEO-friendly? If you have had previous experience in editing tags on images, this process is very much like that. Select ‘Info’ and ‘Settings’ on the video page after you have uploaded your video onto YouTube. There will be a number of options for you to select from. Look at the two sub-categories under: Basic Info and Advanced Settings.
Basic Info:
Title text: The title text field here works just like it does anywhere else. You need to consider the kind of keywords that will get you the maximum traffic. Use keywords that describe your brand perfectly. With only 99 characters allowed here, be as specific as you can.
Description: Here, you can allow your creative juices to flow freely. With 5000 characters allowed here, be sure to add in all the date about your video without cutting corners. Don’t forget to pay close attention to keywords over here too.
Privacy: The three options you will see here are: Private, Public and Unlisted. You would only select the Private option to keep your video private because it is not ready yet; similar to a ‘under construction’ sign on a page. Once your video is all set with optimization, set it to Public and see how it reveals itself.
Tags: To get a good number of views, have good tags. Pick out as many ‘relevant’ tags as you can. Your video will then show up as a suggestion when viewers watch other videos that share your tag. YouTube goes a step further and even suggests tabs based on what you have added in the title and description fields.
Category: You must select the category that represents your product or service most accurately. When people look for your video, the category field you have entered helps.
Advanced Settings:
Comments: This is one tricky part – you want your customers to be able to freely give their comments, but this also [pwal id=”47569142″ description=””]
sometimes becomes a place where negativity may enter as the comment system allows anonymous comments. It would be a good idea to set the drop down in comments to ‘Approved’ so that you have a chance to approve the comments that are posted. You should also enable Video Responses – this is when someone posts a video reply to your post and this always generates more traffic to your video.
Embedding: We know for a fact that social media has become a very important factor in a successful SEO strategy. Quality content makes for shareable content. Embedding makes it more convenient for users to share your video to their blogs or to their Facebook or Twitter pages.
Video location: If you have specific audience in specific areas, video location helps narrow this down. Due to the locality you may enter, the video becomes more visible when someone from that locality searches for the topic of your video.
Syndication: Keep this enabled.
You may think you are quite done, but there is just a last little bit you need to know:
– ensure that you have linked your video from your home page that is focused on the same specific topic.
– Make sure you use your social media outlets to post your videos. You must have it on at least the following platforms: Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Pinterest.
Good luck on making your video stand out to your potential customers!
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