YouTube SEO – How to Optimize YouTube Videos for SEO
With YouTube now being the 2nd largest search engine in the world it makes a lot of sense to understand SEO for YouTube Videos. After reading this post I hope you will have a better understanding of how to optimize your videos so that you get more exposure in YouTube searches as well as organic rankings from your YouTube videos.
This post assumes you have your topics/content in mind or ready to go. The following tips will help make sure you turn these videos into traffic and search engine exposure!
Keep Your Keyword Research in Mind
Keyword research is important in Video SEO because YouTube is a competitive landscape just like Google. With a little time spent doing research you can surely uncover some niche terms that are much easier to rank for. For this example let’s say you want to rank for “SEO” related terms. It makes sense to do some keyword research so that you can possibly find some niches within the industry terms you are targeting. Without this step your video will have a lot harder time ranking.
Let’s look at this simple example for the term SEO:
Now consider this more niche term “St. Louis SEO”:
As you can see the volume of videos you are competing against is drastically lower for the niche term “St. Louis SEO.” Take some time and see if you can uncover some niche terms that are still highly relevant to your videos but would provide a less competitive landscape for you to rank in.
Titles & Descriptions
Once you have your keywords ready to target I like to follow a fairly similar format for all my titles and descriptions. Here’s what that might look like for the term St. Louis SEO.
Title - St. Louis SEO – Benefits of Using a Local St. Louis SEO Company (I prefer to start and end with the keyword you are targeting for best targeting results.)
Description – Here we recommend following best practices for SEO copywriting. It’s debated on whether or not you should lead with a link to your website. Obviously the exposure for your URL is great, but then again it takes away from the characters you have to compel the user to view your video. I suggest trying both ways and see what works best for you. Definitely want to use several “related” terms that are highly relevant to your keyword. Please don’t keyword stuff, and make sure to write the content in a compelling manner that drives the user to take action. This description is what the user will see before view your video so write it for the user and not for the search engine.
Tags – Just like with a blog post you can add tags to your videos. I recommend sticking to around 5-10 tags for each video. If you think you need more than 10 tags for a video I would consider targeting additional video content at the specific phrases you want to rank for.
Identify Link Partners
This is probably the most important part of Video SEO. Just like with website SEO you need link juice to help boost your Video SEO. You should follow the same link building guidelines as you would for website SEO so we won’t go into great detail here but there are a few things I would like to point out.
A simple way to get a link to your video is to do a blog write up around your video content and then link to the video in your post. When you create quality content you can usually find some established blog owners who would welcome a guest blog post that included some unique video content. A great site for finding places to guest blog is www.myblogguest.com
Understand the competition – You can search in YouTube for the keywords you want to rank for and identify the top ranking videos. Take their URL’s and see where they appear on the internet using Google or Linkscape. Once you know who is linking to your competitors’ videos you should start making a list of those sites as well as similar sites. You can then break your list down into categories such as Blogs, Social Media, Industry Orgs, etc, and identify ways to get your content promoted in these same channels. Once you identify good “Video” link partners you can usually count on getting more links for future videos as long as your content stays relevant.
Relevance
Last but not least, you need to give YouTube and Google some additional relevance as to what your video is about. Hopefully you’ve chosen some link partners that are relevant in site content but there is another way to build relevance. Use the Video Reply option in YouTube to simply associate your video with other related videos. Since I view this as a somewhat “spammy” technique, I only recommend replying to 1-2 videos at most.
James Scaggs is an SEO Engineer at Evolve, a St. Louis SEO Company. You can connect with him online by following him on Twitter or LinkedIn.
29 Responses to “YouTube SEO – How to Optimize YouTube Videos for SEO”
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Optimize YouTube Videos for SEO: http://dailyseotip.com/youtube-seo-%e2%80%93-how-to-optimize-youtube-videos-for-seo/786/ #seo #youtube
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Wow, Youtube the second largest search engine! Can you confirm where this stat is verifiable for me as it wasn’t part of the article I read.
If Youtube is the second is Google still the first?
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James Scaggs Reply:
April 27th, 2010 at 2:19 pm
YouTube passed up Yahoo in 2008 according to the article below:
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/posttech/2008/10/youtube_passes_yahoo_in_search.html
and yes, Google is still the market leader by far.
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That’s very good advice, James. According to Chris Sherman, the Executive Editor of Searchengineland at the recent SMX Conference in Sydney, videos will “account for 70% of Internet traffic by 2013″, so the ability to perfect the best VSEO practices now is vital.
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James Scaggs Reply:
April 27th, 2010 at 2:33 pm
Thanks for the kind words!
VSEO as well as mobile SEO are 2 important niches to keep your eyes on over the next few years. I’m sure experts in these fields will have an abundance of opportunities as more companies embrace video and mobile strategies.
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Hi,
Wow! great info! i like the idea of get links on the video. I will try that for sure for our video’s. However, I think its better idea to mention the URL (just once, not make it spam) of the website at description as there is no way to let your visitors know the URL except watermark on the video.
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James Scaggs Reply:
April 27th, 2010 at 2:36 pm
Hey Paul,
I’m glad you enjoyed the article. I absolutely agree with you about including the URL in the description, I’m just not totally sold on the idea of placing the URL and the very beginning of the description. I guess it depends somewhat on what’s more important, getting exposure for your URL or getting a click through to your videos.
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Paul Reply:
April 27th, 2010 at 2:55 pm
Hi James,
I agree with your thought! However, I would not like the idea to add URL as very beginning of the Description as that sometime looks spam. What I suggest is add URL somewhere in the description that makes the description attractive also have the URL.
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Great tip of the day! Always see lots of videos that can hardly be found because no KW are sticking around. Hope that will change
thanks again!
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Obviously a nice tip, really helpful for the Video Optimization. Thanks for such a informative post.
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Great info, very helpful, thanks Ted.
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Great tips. I have a client who has several videos to upload to his Youtube account. I did some killer keyword research for him and this article allows me to use several very good, high demand, low supply keywords for his tags.
Thanks!
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James Scaggs Reply:
April 27th, 2010 at 2:38 pm
Hey Nancy,
Glad you’re able to make use of the tips for your client. I like to also check the search volume for the terms in Google and Google Video to ensure the KW have significant demand across all mediums.
Best,
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How much emphasis do you think is being put on image recognition and audio transcription within the videos. Should we be mentioning our key phrases in the audio and even considering the text in images?
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James Scaggs Reply:
April 27th, 2010 at 5:35 pm
I don’t think YouTube is implementing these techniques, YET…I believe as video becomes a larger % of web traffic the YouTube algorithm will improve to include these types of factors. I do recommend mentioning the key phrases as that seems to be a good indicator of relevant content.
Best!
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Kirt Germond Reply:
August 30th, 2010 at 7:18 pm
Hi James,
Thanks for the info. The latest I heard is that google is scanning the audio channel of a video and using it for search value. Mention keywords here now also.
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http://www.directtrafficmedia.co.uk/News/YouTube_Five_Years_and_Still_No_Downfall_642344723453.html Youtube, 5 years no down yet
… way to go … I don’t know if they will ever make it paid …
Focus on
1) Embed code
2) Bringing link to youtube page
3) Title, comment, description and rating
I have seen many videos coming better than pages in universal search.
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Good blog and good advise. I enjoyed the article very much.I like the idea to add the URL….
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Hi there James
Quoting you : “… When you create quality content you can usually find some established blog owners who would welcome a guest blog post that included some unique video content. A great site for finding places to guest blog is http://www.myblogguest.com …”
That is exceptionally useful advice.
Always something to learn.
Thanks
Jonathan
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Optimising youtube videos works much better now that they are intergrated with normal google search results. It is well worth your time to optimise the title of youtube videos.
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Youtube videos is importance in sem field for increase your visitor. your post is helpful to sem.
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Focus on
1) Embed code
2) Bringing link to youtube page
3) Title, comment, description and rating
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Fal Reply:
May 18th, 2010 at 2:38 pm
Is “Embedding code” not similar like “bringing link to Youtube page”? In both ways it generate a backlink to the video, right?
Thanks
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Enjoyable article. Thanks for sharing. Keep it up.
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Interesting ^^ Youtube SEO
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Hi
I was just wondering whether when you put a link in your video description to your website, does that link count as a good inbound link for SEO of your website?
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James Scaggs Reply:
May 27th, 2010 at 12:45 am
Those links are considered no-follow, so they don’t actually pass link juice.
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Thanks you all for the perfect things that you shared with us.
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This information was exactly what I was looking for. You explained exactly how to get my youtube videos ranked well in the search engines. I appreciate it.
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