A lot of people are surprised to learn that YouTube is one of the top three search engines in the world. ‘YouTube? Search Engine?’, You wonder? The fact of the matter is that YouTube is used for searching videos and it has a huge user base! This is why it also has rankings for its videos.
YouTube is also a very handy tool in case you want to promote your business. Now, not every business can be marketed there but you would be surprised at how many different types of businesses use videos to sell themselves. Videos aren’t just about advertising, since a lot of companies use ‘How-To’ videos, infomercials, and sometimes simply humour to promote their channel, and through that, their websites.
This means that having a high ranking video, or channel becomes very important in terms of YouTube and SEO. A video’s ranking is highly dependent on its relevance. Relevance does not mean the video has to be relevant to the company’s products, although that is advisable! Relevance has to do more with how relevant your video is to someone’s search. So how do you promote your YouTube presence? With SEO, of course! Here are a few YouTube and SEO tips:
YouTube and SEO Keywords
As with everything else, keywords are a very essential part of SEO. YouTube is no different. YouTube’s search ranking is largely dependent on keywords, although that is not the only criterion. YouTube has four places where keyword placement can improve your video’s ranking. These are:
- The Title of the Video
- The Description of the Video
- The Transcription of the Video
- Tags on the video
With the proper placement of keywords, you can make a huge difference to your website and channel’s traffic. There is even local SEO relevant to YouTube
The Title of the Video
The title of the video is the name or the heading of your video, and that is the first thing YouTube and Google check. Having a title at has the appropriate keywords in it give your video an advantage when it comes to search rankings.
Also, YouTube checks the title to determine the relevance of the video in a given search. Therefore, choosing an appropriate title becomes very important for your ranking.
The Description of the Video
The description of the video is where a lot of people lose out on. This is an opportunity for you to create an appropriate, keyword-rich description of the video which YouTube and Google will ‘read’ to determine its content, relevance, and rank. Most people waste this spot with just a link to their websites, which defeats the purpose and they lose out on ranking. One should ideally have a 300-500 word description of the video with appropriate keywords scattered in it.
The Transcription of the Video
The transcription of the video is a relatively unknown factor to most people. A transcription is something that YouTube does for all its videos, although the accuracy of the transcription is not guaranteed. Transcription is simply a text version of the content of the video, and studies have shown that Google often determines the relevance of the video from its transcripts.
Phrases or keywords that do not appear in the title or description, but appear in the content, have often caused videos to appear higher in ranking than other videos. At this point, the content becomes very important and it should be rich in keywords without becoming forced.
It is a relatively easy task to transcribe your video as a text file and upload it on YouTube with the video. This way the transcription will be accurate and you will be able to take advantage of this feature offered by Google and YouTube!
As it is with blog articles, it is possible to have tags for your video. Ideally, every video should have at least ten tags that have some of the most relevant keywords.
About Author
