YouTube; everyone knows it and you’d be hard pressed to find anyone that’s never used it. The video sharing site plays host to everything from the latest movie trailers and music videos, to footage of animals doing strange and obscure things that the owners wish to share with the world.
The fact that YouTube has so many videos on it, covering an absolutely massive range of topics, raises a very important question: how do you know if your video is actually going to be watched amongst the rest?
Views aren’t going to be at the forefront of the average user’s mind – they might only upload a video to YouTube so that they can share it with family or friends.
However, YouTube is also a platform for businesses like yours to broadcast their brand. It’s another form of social media that you want to be found on, so that more people can discover you and your company. Making sure you’re found is vital to this.
And that’s where video optimisation comes in.
Here are 5 tips on how to optimise your channel and video’s so that you’re more likely to be found.
1. Craft A Great Title
Just like the title on a webpage, the title of your video is vitally important. YouTube uses this as one of the main factors on whether or not to show a video in the search results. Not only should your title be relevant to the video, but also it should also contain keywords or phrases that people are likely to search for.
Titling a video badly is a sure fire way to lose out on potentially thousands of views.
The above example is from SEOmoz’s MozHQ channel. It’s catchy, it explains what the video is about and it’s optimised.
2. Write An Awesome Description
Your description is also important and should be used to describe the content of the video while again including important keywords and phrases.
It’s also the only place you can include a link to your website – although you can’t specify anchor text (which is no bad thing if you’ve over optimised your link building). If you’re a business advertising a product you’d be missing out massively by not including a link to the appropriate page on your site.
3. Throw In Some Tags
Tags are the best place to include your keywords. Enter relevant keywords that are related to your video, so that YouTube knows more about its contents.
4. Utilise Annotations
Annotations allow you to add something extra to your video after you’ve uploaded it. This could be a text annotation, used for adding in an extra level of description or it may contain a link to another of your videos.
Annotations work as call-to-actions, which (if used well) are non-intrusive and encourage people to engage with you. This is is incredibly useful if you want your viewers to carry out a task (subscribe to our channel, like our video, visit our site) after watching your video.
5. Organise With Playlists
Playlists help you to organise your videos into categories for easier viewing. Not only do they encourage people to watch more videos (because they simply have to watch everything in a playlist), but also they can advertise your videos together. Playlists can have their own title and description – and they show up in YouTube’s results separately to individual videos.
That means your playlist containing five videos could have six slots in the YouTube search results, so you’ve got a higher chance of your videos appearing if they’re also in a relevant playlist.
