When it comes to online video marketing, we often assume that the only hope of getting a substantial quantity of views is through some form of viral marketing, which don’t get me wrong is a brilliant tactic of gaining traffic to your video but with Google shifting further towards universal search results, optimising your video for search is something that certainly shouldn’t be underestimated or ignored, so how can you optimise your videos to perform better in search? Here are my top ten tips for optimising your videos for higher search rankings.
#1 Pick Descriptive Title Tags
It’s generally accepted amongst SEO’s that title tag keyword relevancy and positioning is one of the biggest on site search ranking factors that we can influence. On almost all video hosting sites including Youtube, the title tag follows the format of ‘Youtube – ‘video name’. As you can see in the example above, the song name is followed by ‘(New Rap Music / Hip Hop)’, improving the chances of this particular video being found for such terms, which a quick keyword tool checks will reveal are incredibly popular search terms.
#2 Internal Linking with Video Responses
One of the best ways to get Google to index a new webpage on your site is to building internal links from your popular pages to this new page. Youtube is no different and luckily for you, you’re able to easily add links from these popular pages using video responses (most of time anyway). Obviously these need to be from relevant pages but they will not only build internal links to your videos, they’re also likely to send traffic from people browsing for related videos.
#3 Internal Linking with Playlists
One brilliantly successful trick to supercharge your video’s traffic is to put it in a playlist with several other highly popular related videos. Playlists tend to appear very high up on the Youtube search results page, which helps your video receive a high proportion of Youtube search traffic. The benefits don’t end there though, when you group a collection of songs together in a playlist it is possible that your video will be automatically linked to as a ‘related playlist result’ in the sidebar along other videos within that playlist, which means more internal link juice and more chance of someone clicking through to your video, nice.
#4 Encourage Ratings
There have been many rumors in the past about Google only considering videos for universal search results that have a certain threshold of ratings, personally I don’t think there is a set threshold on ratings as I have seen many videos indexed in universal results with a very low number of ratings, I imagine ratings are used relatively to find the most popular videos for a certain search term and those with the highest number of ratings will score the universal search results for that term. To encourage viewers to rate your video I would recommend adding annotations (an editing feature on Youtube) towards the end of the video reminding them to rate your video.
#5 Encourage Comments
In the same way that comments on a blog post help to reinforce keywords and improve long tail traffic by having additional content, video comments on Youtube will also help to add crawlable content to your video page, but it will also improve the quantity of internal links pointing to your video as a link to your video will appear on the commenter’s profile page.
#6 Build External Links
Although it’s unlikely to have much of an effect on your ranking within the Youtube search results or in Google Universal Search, it still helps standard (non-universal) Youtube results to rank better in Google’s Index.
#7 Widescreen vs. 4:3
I have heard rumors that posting your content in 4:3 resolution will increase the likelihood of it being indexed in universal search results as that is roughly the size of the thumbnails, however I would argue against this based on the number of widescreen videos that now appear in universal search results and the fact that the majority of people prefer to view videos in widescreen resolution, so it would be in Googles best interest to deliver what it is that it’s users prefer.
#8 Link from your video description
Youtube shows 27 characters in the video description before it’s truncated with ‘…’. It’s recommended to include a clickable link to your website within this limit to help refer traffic from your video to your site.
#9 Don’t Limit Yourself to Youtube
Despite Youtube’s dominance in the video hosting website market, I would strongly recommend hosting your video on multiple video hosts (with slightly varied titles) to increase the ability of your video being found from search engines. You can use a time saving service like Tubemogul to distribute your video to multiple video hosts in one upload.
#10 Add Relevant tags
I’m unsure as to what extent tags will impact your rankings for the tagged terms on Youtube but I imagine they will have a positive impact providing that they’re relevant and not used in excess.
Photo credit: Damon Duncan
Pure excellence, great post Marcus and thank you!
When I get to setup my You Tube channel. I will definitely remember these tips you shared. I never read anything as useful as this post as to optimizing your You Tube channel. Thanks for sharing! Will definitely be retweeting this.
thanks for these; I’m exploring adding video to my website. The most important thing is to remember youtube is not the only video distribution outlet. Good stuff!
Just getting into video and sure glad I found your website
some great youtube tips “gonna book mark them”,my videos are not getting many views at the moment
I have joined tube mogul and found their service excellent
also I have manually submitted my videos to a few other video sites
takes a bit of work but hopefully it will be worth it
Cheers Mick
Great article Marcus! Will definitely put your tips into action. Have you used Traffic Geyser? Any feedback on their services vs. TubeMogul? Cheers,
Jackson
Thanks Jackson! :)
I used to use Traffic Gueyser, but I remember it was more limited in terms of the number of video hosting sites that it sent your videos to and I believe it’s also a paid service whereas Tubemogul is free.
However, Traffic Gueyser also allows you to distribute content to podcast sites, RSS directories, article directories and more so it’s a bit more of an all around package. Both are really great services though!
Good article. I can vouch for mixing up descriptions and posting to various video sites (though I’m not going to say which ones!). It works.
Great post! Just to add..consider using a tag for your video that is in the form of a question. http://www.verndale.com/Our-Thinking/Optimizing-for-Questions-in-SEO.aspx
I would say that tags have a big impact on your numbers when it comes to search. I recommend to all my clients to optimize their tags as much as possible. I will say however, I’ve never run a test where I didn’t optimize the title for search and only optimizing the tags. I always optimize both.
I would add to your list, thumbnails for YouTube partners.
Good tips.
-Damien
Thank you for this interesting article, I have never considered the video responses as a way to do internal linking so thank you for that recommendation.
Nice writeup, thanks for it..
Great article – would you ever consider developing your own player in order to obtain the first amounts of backlinks – or would you always prefer using youtube.com?
Great post! Now i will start setting internal links to my clips! Thank you!
Thanks for this post, I will definitely be looking into applying some of these tips as I upload more videos myself over the next few weeks.
By the way, is it a good idea to change the name of your videos from time to time? (maybe you can pick up people searching for videos using differing names or search terms?)
Thanks.
Excellent post with many ideas i hadn’t thought about. Have you done anything with transcripts and trying to link from them to the video or putting some of the transcripts in the comment or descriptions?
Also – any opinion on SEO approaches for embedded versus linked videos?
I assume a lot of these techniques apply to image SEO as well?
Thanks again!
Niel & Rasmus – In most cases I would recommend uploading the video to Youtube, embedding it on to your site and adding something extra to your page that would encourage people to link to your page opposed to the Youtube page – perhaps some screenshots or a text script of the video.
If done well you can get the best of both options (links to your site and video traffic from Youtube!)
Good post.
Wondering if making a video is the main problem?
We use a presentation that is converted into a video to get on YouTube.
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Thanks for writing such an appealing post about seo.I like your style of writing.
Great post – thanks! Just wondering, does the channel name affect SEO like pagenames do? eg /myvideos versus /my-videos
That’s a great post. The tip of posting video replies is a great call. I’ve been using TubeMogul, and while I like, I wonder how good that traffic really is. I’ve seen some great search results for a few weak keywords, but nothing to challenging yet as far as search terms.
I wonder how long Youtube will allow for links in the comments…time will tell.
Funny how its is very similar to traditional SEO. I think YouTube is even more fun too!
Great Post Marcus
New Fan-
Dustin Wunderlich
http://www.greenthumbmarketing.com
Hi Marcus,
Thank you for your article. It provides with the foundations to start doing good SEO with Videos.
I will be waiting for your next post!!!
Regards
Manuel
Thanks for this post. I have the same question as marnie above – When setting up a new channel does your username play any role in SEO?
Best Reagdrds,
Stephanie
Just to let you know that YouTube have stamped on using video responses for SEO
You can now only use a video 1 time as a video response – if you use it again, the first video response is deleted
As best SEO benefit is to have only 1 video per YouTube account (last video uploaded is only one to have a dofollow link) it pretty much kills using video responses for SEO for me, as I only use 1 video per account
Interesting post. Do you know some site from where you can download youtube movies?
Thanks you for the great info. It has been very helpful!
Great article, the popularity of youtube means that the backlinks gained from a youtube channel are becoming more and more powerful.
I’ve been wondering about something, when it comes to URLs & YouTube…
Does it help adding your URL to your profile? I mean like, sometimes I create a new channel and I get the option when I edit my channel, and sometimes I do not. If anyone is following what I mean. Then again, when I click “My Channel” and then “edit” (Not “Edit Channel”, just below that near the “About” section). Does it matter where you leave your URL?
Also, what if you splash some anchor texts, several with the same URL, but with different keywords in that section, does that help out? I can never find a clear enough answer to this question. I’ve been creating videos, adding the URL inside the actual video, because I heard Google has a patent on reading videos, is this also true? Oy, so many questions.. this gets confusing.
its a worthwhile reading and imlementing
Nice post sir!
These are in fact enormous ideas in about blogging.
You have touched some good factors here. Any way keep up wrinting.