YouTube is the world’s second largest search engine after Google. Around 6 billions hours of videos are streamed on a monthly basis on the platform. And it is only expected to grow in future despite stiff competition from Facebook, Instagram, etc.
Many individuals have become bigger stars than the traditional TV or movie celebrities, thanks to YouTube. If you want to shine on YouTube, your videos must be visible to the appropriate users. That means, when users search for videos related to your niche, your videos must be displayed on the top of the search results.
Here are some Advanced Techniques to Optimize YouTube Videos
Write Detailed Description and be Thorough
Since Google owns YouTube, the SEO philosophy for both Google as well as YouTube is same. Google emphasizes more on contextual search results. That means, it takes into the consideration, the context based content in addition to the title and meta description to rank web pages in SERP (Search Engine Result Pages). So, if you write a detailed description of videos, YouTube search engine will find it easy to derive contextual meaning out of it. Therefore, your videos will be ranked higher for a vast number of related keywords. Also, while uploading the video, fill the complete detail about the video including the date and location of the shoot. Being thorough in providing information about the video is quite helpful in the ranking of videos on YouTube.
Optimize it for Length
The length of YouTube videos matters a lot in SEO. According to a research, YouTube videos which are longer than 10 minutes are watched by a majority of viewers. Also, mobile users love to watch videos which are 3-6 minutes long. Do a proper research and find out the ideal length of the video your audience is most likely to watch. Create most of your videos of similar duration.
Keyword Research for Contextual Search
As mentioned above, context plays a crucial role in ranking of YouTube videos. Thus, you must optimize your videos for contextual keywords. Here is an excellent guide to keyword research for contextual search using Google Keyword Planner. Remember that useful videos are also displayed on Google SERP. Thus, optimizing for contextual keywords will help you on YouTube as well as Google search engine which will amplify the reach.
Get More Views
The video views greatly influence the ranking of the video. Thus it is critical to generating more views as soon as you publish the video on YouTube. There are many ways to get views. The best way is to use your own audience base. Embed your videos on your website, blog, and other social media pages, etc. It is an easy and effective technique to generate more views. If your videos are awesome, it will be further shared by people, and hence, the number of views will increase exponentially.
Another way to generate more views is to use the crowdsourcing approach. You need to be careful while using this technique as it must meet the terms and policies of YouTube. Many publishers use Amazon’s Mechanical Turk or freelancing marketplaces to conduct a market research and generate the views in the process. For instance, you can provide a link to your videos and asked users on Mechanical Turk to watch it and provide their feedback. You can pay them for the time spent. In this way, you will get more views without violating the YouTube policies.
Themed Playlist
Create a themed playlist of videos. You don’t have to be a creator to make a playlist. Simply add few videos including yours based on a single related theme. Since YouTube promotes Playlists aggressively, you will get
video views as well as see a surge in ranking in some time. YouTube is a red hot marketing platform for small businesses or individuals who want to make money online. The SEO of videos are still easier than that of web pages. So, use the techniques mentioned above for your maximum advantage.
Do you have got a YouTube SEO hack? Please share them in the comments.
