Learn Seo – How To Optimize Youtube Tags?

Given that YouTube has over 90 million visits a day (in the US alone)  – why do most marketing managers ignore this valuable website as part of their social marketing campaigns?

What Exactly Is Youtube?

Seems an unnecessary question – surely it’s a video sharing website and a repository of online videos?

Correct but it is also a search engine. In fact with 80 million visits a day it is the Number 2 search engine on the internet.

So, apart from music and comedy videos, people use YouTube to get more serious information and education. This means that by optimising their video content business marketers can make sure their product or service is easily found and gets lots of views and drives more website traffic.

The broad factors controlling the Youtube search engine rankings fall into three broad areas as follows:

1. 1. On-Page SEO Factors:

Videos need to be optimised in a similar way to website pages. However, instead of meta data and body copy, it is important to ensure that keywords appear in the title, description, and tags.

1. 2. Off-Page SEO Factors

Just as with a website there are many of these. A major one is inbound links. A YouTube videos should have external links with keyword-rich anchor text pointing to gain authority.

1. 3. Community Interaction Factors

In addition to links and the age of each video, YouTube also measures a video’s authority based on the interaction that takes place in the interest community or the category in which it is indexed. This means the number of views, ratings, comments, and other interactions. So to have a chance at achieving SEO success in YouTube, the video content must be interesting, engaging, and compelling enough to make people watch it, rate it, and comment on it.

So does your SEO strategy include YouTube? If not it definitely should.

Can Youtube Be Used To Generate New Business Sales Leads?

The clear answer is yes. The question is why do most companies avoid using YouTube, or if they do start to use it, usually neglect to maintain and optimise their YouTube channel? Why do marketing managers not integrate the use of video as part of their social media strategy?

Maybe the reason is that a lot of businesses see YouTube purely as a place where individuals can gain traction, but companies but can’t cut it. I want to dispel that myth in this post and explain what it takes for a business to do well on YouTube.

Remember when you’re building a channel on YouTube you’re not just planning to get people to find your business through YouTube. Since Google bought YouTube it’s been including videos increasingly more in it’s search engine results pages (SERP) and with the fragmentation of the SERP due to universal search, adding the use of video to your social media strategy is definitely a must!

Let’s look at some case studies where companies have successfully used YouTube as part of their social media strategy.

(Note: I deliberately tried not to include big brands in these case studies – we haven’t all got the budgets of Nike or Google!)

This company produce ‘How To’ tips and advice on just about anything you’d care to mention.   They have successfully built you a strong fan base on YouTube. Their videos are well presented, but by no means has their been expensive production costs. The people in the videos come across as very knowledgeable about their particular field of expertise. Ok, so you might think this company is custom fit to produce videos  – no so. If you look at their website for an example, let’s say How To Build a Light Meter, this is all text, no video in sight.

So How Can You Optimise a Website For Youtube?

Here are some useful suggestions that will help you get a higher ranking and more visibility on Youtube. These tips deal with the most important factors to optimise for including:

• Content
• Video tags
• The community
• Software tools

Content Tips

To work best you need videos that are likely to go viral. One way to achieve this would be to name your video channel with a theme that is likely to encourage content syndication by viewers. For example you could call your video channel a name commencing with one of the following keywords:

“How to…”

or

“Learn seo…”

For example this is what “Learn seo” would return.

Place your URL at the beginning and end of your video and if there is room also place it along the bottom of the video screen.

Have a clear call to action such as “For more information visit www.interleado.com”

Remember the optimum time for a video is around 3 minutes – Youtube will allow up to 10 minutes but in our view that is often too long to retain a viewers attention.

Video Tag Optimization Tips

Jonathan Mendez’s 7 Ways to Optimize Your YouTube Tags is worth checking out. He suggests to:

• The video Title (120 characters) should contain a headline containing the keywords that searchers may type in to the search box. Just as in website seo, if keywords are close to the front of the title this will help the ranking. If you want to include a brand name in the title, put it at the end.
• The Description (1,000 characters) needs to have all of the keywords that are relevant to your video. The first thing to appear should always be your playlist or website landing page link (with http://), followed by a carriage return. The description is mostly hidden, but your link will still be visible if you type it first. However for your the description should be as detailed as possible for optimization purposes.
• Use multiple relevant Tags (120 characters). Should be as detailed as possible but make sure that they are consistent with each other, match the title and relate to the content. Tags should include: keywords, brand, city, topics
  Make sure all the main keywords in your tags are also in your title and descriptions
• Use adjectives in the description and tags, remember that searchers will use these to find what they are looking for.
• Use category description tags
• Don’t use natural language phrases and waste tag space on words like “and” or “to.”

Here is an example of what you could do:

Youtube Community Optimisation Tips

Matthew Liu of YouTube gives some useful tips on this subject.

The idea is to get found by people in your interest community and get them to view your video content, favourite it, rate it and comment on it

To summarise:

• Embed your video on your website surrounded by relevant text content
• Upload each video to your website before loading to Youtube as this will ensure you get backlinks from Youtube that will pass link juice to your video’s web page
• Encourage community interaction by:
  • Enabling ratings
  • Use annotations. For example if you have a series of videos on the same theme use annotations to cross refer to the previous and next videos in the series
  • Post video responses to your own videos that point users to your next video.
  • Use your relevant videos to post a video response to videos that have complimentary content to yours

Software Tools

Consider using TubeMogul which is is a free service that provides a single point for deploying uploads to the top video sharing sites. TubeMogul will report on who, what, and how videos are being viewed.

Another analytics tool for YouTube is YouTube Insight. This will give you lots of detailed information similar to Tube Mogul.

With Insight you can see how many page views you have, how popular it is, where people found your video, what country people watching your video are from, what sections of your video are most popular and least popular.

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