Best Practices for Video Optimization on YouTube
April 25th, 2011
Marketing videos on YouTube is rapidly growing as one of the major online marketing tools, it’s affordable and has great impact on consumer behavior. As YouTube video views are continuing to grow rapidly every day, using YouTube as a major method of organic traffic generation for your site, it’s a guaranteed recipe for success!
Video Optimization Objectives
- Achieve high ranks for videos on search engine results page for targeted keywords
- Increase the number of views to the video on YouTube, social websites and business blog(s)
- Support / start a viral buzz for a new product on social media websites
- Build high relevancy links from video page to product page and vice versa to increase its authority
Video Optimization Challenges
The main challenge is that search engines can’t parse videos (most search engines are originally designed to index HTML content). Search engine can read and base their ranking algorithm on following factors: video title, description, comments, ratings, number of shares and some Meta information.
YouTube Video Optimization Best Practices
- YouTube Channel: upload video to the most appropriate channel to the brand and don’t use any personal accounts to do so.
- Video Title: is considered one of the most important factors for video ranking on search engines and YouTube search results page.
- Start video title with the main keyword or product main feature
- Include targeted geographical location and brand name in the title (if applicable)
- Title length shouldn’t exceed 45 characters (with spaces), Avg. 5-7 words
- Uses a catchy title, videos get watched because of how they are titled – “how they sell themselves.” - Video description:
- Write the description in a compelling manner that drives the user to take action. This description is what the user will see before view your video on search engine result pages.
- Use several related terms “long tail keywords” in the description that are highly relevant to the top targeted keyword and don’t keyword stuff the video description
- It’s recommended to use the video transcript and revise it to make it reader-friendly
- Include a clickable (full path) URL in the first line of the description. Best pages to link to are: product and catalog pages - Video duration: video duration shouldn’t exceed 3-4 minutes
- Video Category: choose the most appropriate 1 to 3 categories
- Video Tags: Use 5-10 tags for each video. Tags could be product name, product benefits, city, province name and brand name
- Video Rating: Allow users to rate the video; search engines will pay attention to high rated videos. It’s also a key part of “going viral”, as potential viewers are very attracted to highly rated videos.
- Video File Name: it’s recommended to rename the video file before uploading it to YouTube, use the top targeted keyword as the file name
Other Factors Affect Videos Ranking and Visibility Outside of YouTube
- Embed YouTube video on your product and home page
- Create a Blog post about the new video and embed it within the same post
- Post the YouTube URL into Facebook business fan page wall and retweet it
Advanced YouTube Video Optimization Opportunities
- YouTube Call To Action Overlay: a popup footer banner that appears 10sec into the video and 10sec from the end of the video. It could be used to share more information about the content of your video or to raise interest to your channel, other videos or link to an external website. There’s no additional charge to setup this feature but it involves
- Connecting YouTube account to AdWords
- Creating a promoted videos YouTube account - Video Annotations: a way to add a banner, text link or interactive commentary to videos. You could link any annotations to YouTube videos, channels, or search results from within a video.
generation
June 20th, 2012 at 3:31 pm
I wanted to thank you for this good read!! I absolutely enjoyed every little bit of it.