YouTube Video Optimization

Being 2nd largest search engine YouTube can gain you more search traffic thanks Bing and Yahoo does together. Hundreds and thousands of hours of video content are uploaded on YouTube every hour and over 6 billion hours of video are watched every month.

What’s the best way to reach your right target audience in this crowded market? YouTube video SEO is the answer, so if you’re not focusing on SEO then you’re missing out a lot.

In this guide to SEO, you will learn about a few fundamentals of Optimization, how to rank your video, and increase visibility.

YouTube’s search engine is different from Google’s search engine.  It cannot directly tell whether the tags are relevant or not or you used keywords inside your video or not. So how does determine ranking?  ranking factors can be categorized into two categories. The first is Video Content and the second is User Engagement.

Let’s start with Video Content and It includes Title, description, tags, thumbnail, age restrictions, and transcripts.

Video content is the foundation of SEO much like on-site optimization. If you do this right then you can rank top without having high User Engagement.

Video Content-

●     Title

The title is the most important factor in SEO, you can use this space to put your keywords in and have a direct benefit. It also affects the CTR (Click-through rate) as it has a prominent place in Search Result Pages. Google also displays videos in search results and through only title users can easily identify that your video is related to their query or not. If Google thinks your video is a good answer to a query then it will display your video in search results on that keyword.

Note- Never sacrifice Title relevance of video for sake of search ranking. Google knows what’s the most relevant and best content for their users.

●     Description

Video’s description is for the benefit of users who are searching their queries in search. Creators describe what their video is about in their description and place relevant links also. The description helps to increase the CTR because users who searched the query and found the exact match in the video description will click to watch the video instantly. Embolden the keywords in the description to gain the attention of users. Always put relevant and qualified or affiliate links in your description to help people have a further idea.

●     Tags

Tags are a great way to target different keywords without being seen. Always use relevant tags and use at least 10 to 15 tags. Target those extra keywords liked miss spelled keywords, plural, and non-plural keywords, etc. If you are planning to create a campaign you should also consider Hashtags which allows users to find videos easily.

●     Transcription

If supports the language you used in the video then it will automatically transcribe the video for you. But is not great at transcribing the video and it’s totally unreliable that’s why you should make your own subtitles.  uses transcripts to index the videos and also to rank the video on some keywords that are used in transcripts.

User Engagement Factors-

●     Views

Views help a lot in boosting videos SEO. How can you get more views? Promote your videos. Share your videos on social media, share it in your blogs, tell your friends to share on their accounts. The better quality of viewership and audience retention is gained from the more videos each user watches for longer durations. By analyzing the engagement tab in video analytics you can determine why the viewer skipped your video or closed it.

●     Social Shares 

You can easily share your videos through the share button right below your published video. Share your videos on your social media accounts as much as you can. There are a number of good sites which you can easily get traffic from like Reddit, Tumblr, Facebook, Viral Chop, etc.

●     Embeds

The Embed feature of helps you to take the video outside  and still be able to track your views counts, duration viewers watched audience retention, etc.  counts this as a positive user engagement signal which helps in boosting the video SEO.

●     Comments

Comments are a very powerful User Engagement factor that plays an important role in SEO. Comments give huge relevance, trust, and authority signals to grow your channel authority and improve your chances to rank.  is very good at identifying which comments are original and which are spam so don’t try to play .

●     Like, Dislike and Favorites

Getting more likes is very important for SEO as it sends positive user engagement signals to . Getting more dislikes also affects ranking in a negative way showing that your video may have poor relevance.

If you’re asking your friends to share the video on their social media then be free to ask them to like the video also and add it to their favorite list.

By Mayank

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