Strategic Video SEO Tips To Improve Your YouTube Ranking

Posted on November 7, 2014 by Melanie Yunk

Following a video SEO strategy can boost your YouTube ranking and increase your chances of reaching your target audience. With 100 hours of videos uploaded every minute, each video you post is instantly competing with hundreds or even thousands of others. How can you give your video an edge over the competition? The answer is by optimizing your video SEO to achieve maximum results when interested viewers search for content like yours.

For those of you who don’t know the basics, familiarize yourself with 3 important content elements to quickly make a difference in the success of your YouTube videos: keywords, descriptions and tags.

Keywords are Key

Keywords should be used in your video’s title, description, video script and “About Us” section. Effective keywords sound natural and should not be obnoxiously over used in your video or in your text. Also, prior to uploading a video, change the filename to include your main keyword or keyword phrase (e.g. keyword.mpv).

Create Relevant Readable Descriptions

YouTube better ranks a video and understands content with a well-written description. One easy way to improve YouTube ranking is to upload a transcript directly into the description field. An even more effective method is to write a description including your keywords and other on-topic words in a natural way. Incorporate just enough detail to increase YouTube ranking without discouraging your audience from actually needing to watch your video.

Tags Help Searchers and Search Engines

Tags are not seen on the published video page but are instrumental in helping users find your content. Keep in mind YouTube does not like unclear tags, so stick with 10-20 specific and relevant tags for the best results. Adding your channel name into your tags is incredibly helpful to getting videos seen. This will allow the search engines to collect all your related videos within your channel together giving them all a boost in the rankings when searched.

Additional Video SEO Strategies

After the basics, follow these tips to further improve your YouTube ranking:

• Publish videos regularly and consistently. Having more content influences your ranking.
• Publish your videos on a channel and on playlists. An active channel is favorable to search engines. Plus, videos included on playlists carry more weight than those not on playlists.
• Boost your video SEO by providing quality content people want to watch all the way through. YouTube’s ranking algorithm factors in how long your videos are viewed.
• Encourage social sharing. Likes, favorites, shares and activity in the comments section all influence whether your video is seen. Don’t forget to respond to comments as this encourages additional engagement and boosts your ranking as well.
• 
Embed your video on your website to create a backlink. Creating backlinks builds your credibility with YouTube. Beware, too many backlinks created at one time or suspicious links to your video can negatively impact your video’s success.

If you optimize your videos in the ways mentioned above, you are giving them a better chance of reaching your target audience and achieving success. Once you have carried out these video SEO strategies, remember to share your videos via social networks for maximum overall impact.

Do you have any additional video SEO methods you use to improve your YouTube ranking? Share your tips below.

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