4 Awesome Tips to Optimize Your YouTube Videos

Unless you have been living under a rock, you are probably aware at how powerful video content has become.   In fact, according to Cisco online video users are expected to double to 1.5 billion in 2016.

• One-third of all online activity is spent watching video

• 100 million internet users watch an online video everyday

• Videos increase people’s understanding of a product or service by 74%

• Every month the average internet user is exposed to an average of 32.2 videos

*mind-blowing facts courtesy of Digital Sherpa

Of course when it comes to video there is no bigger player than YouTube.   It’s the third most visited website, has over 6 billion hours of watched videos every month, and has 100 hours of uploaded videos every single minute.

All these impressive statistics go to prove YouTube’s significance in today’s ever changing online business world.   Although, much like everything else there are key ways to best optimize your YouTube videos.

1. Keywords

Just like SEO, YouTube videos still need to be optimized with the proper keywords.  Why go through all the trouble, time, and expense of producing quality videos if you are going to ignore the selection of the right keywords?

There are a plethora of premium YouTube specific keyword search tools that you can use.  Here are just a few:

• YouTube’s built in Keyword Tool (aka YouTube Keyword Suggestion Tool) – this is a barebones simple to use tool for generating and discovering keywords or your videos.

• KeywordTool.io – this tool uses YouTube autocomplete feature to generate over 750 long-tail keywords for given query. Supports 41 languages and 231 countries.

• Soovle.com – a “customizable search tool” that works by pulling together the suggestions from up to 15 search engines as you type your keywords into the search box.

2.  Title, Description, and Tags

This is where all your previous keyword research and selections come into play.

The titles for your videos have 100 character limit, and should include your most important keyword close to the beginning of your title.   Your titles can be long phrased, but a short title of less than 70 words is optimal.  Also, according to Mark Robertson of ReelSEO, you should consider adding a standard video “trigger” keyword, or a word that attracts attention in search engine results, to your video.

The video description is short copy that is associated with your video and thus the largest portion of text that the search engines can read to index your videos.  There is a 5,000 character limit here.  Make certain to use the same keywords as in your title so that both the search engines and your potential viewers will catch the correlation.  Also, don’t forget any important links to resources or websites.

Unlike keywords that you include both in your title and descriptions, you also are able to select additional keyword tags.  Your tags can use up to 120 characters total.   They should be relevant to your video and match up with both your title and description.

3.  Playlist

Creating a video playlist for similar types of videos can help boost their visibility.  Not only do video playlists appear within the YouTube search results, but other videos in that same playlist can also appear in the sidebar of the player as related content when someone watches a video that’s included in the same playlist.  This will help to improve the views of other videos that you have added, rather than directing them to other content that YouTube sees as similar but that belongs to other account holders.

4.  User engagement

It’s all about the number of views, likes and shares.

There are many black hat style companies out there that will offer you video views and shares for a price.   However, these methods can’t help you to get the maximum output needed for high user engagement.

You can follow these simple tips to increase your user engagement naturally:

• Produce high quality video using a quality camera and audio recording device.

• Brand your YouTube channel

• Don’t directly market your product – rather address the potential problem of your viewers first

• Comment on the videos of related channels.

• Add videos to your website and other social media channels

• Use annotations to encourage your visitors to subscribe to your channel.

Are you using videos to market to your potential customer base?  If so, how have you used these or other ides for them to find your videos online?