YouTube’s millions of videos receive a collective 2 billion+ views per day. If you’re looking to slice a nice piece out for yourself, you need to keep these YouTube SEO tips in mind to make sure that you’re doing all that you can to ensure that it’s your videos which are being seen by the masses.
YouTube SEO
Keywords
Keywords are essential in YouTube SEO just like in any other form of SEO. You need to make sure that your videos are optimized for the keywords which you’re targeting so that you have a better chance of them being seen both in YouTube as well as outside in Google. First do your keyword research as you normally would (see what is a good keyword and how to do keyword research).
Once you have the keyword you want to target for that particular video, weave that keyword phrase into your video’s title, description, and tags to maximize your YouTube SEO. Just like with SEO on any other platform, target just one keyword phrase per video.
Ratings
User ratings (thumbs up or thumbs down) can affect your video’s visibility both positively or negatively in YouTube and in Google. If you get a lot of thumbs downs or in other words if a lot of people are giving your video a negative rating, it will not appear as readily as other videos when people are searching for whatever keywords you’re targeting. Just like Google, YouTube wants to supply their users with only the most quality content, and that’s a part of it. This makes sense considering Google owns YouTube.
Video Quality
This is an extension of the last point, but the quality of your video overall will obviously dictate the kinds of ratings which you get. I’m talking both literally the video picture quality as well as the quality of the content itself.
I’ve heard marketers make a correlation between the actual video picture quality and that video’s rankings, but this may be a byproduct of the fact that people prefer to watch higher quality videos, and a lower quality video which is fuzzier and harder to see/read will likely garner lower ratings than a video which is of higher and clearer quality.
Better picture AND content quality videos will get higher ratings and consequently will rank higher in YouTube and independently in Google itself. This is something which I talk about in my online video marketing tutorial.
Views
Videos which get more views are considered to be more popular and of higher quality. Generally high play count/viewed videos are seen as being more relevant and of higher quality, otherwise they wouldn’t get those views, so the more views which a video receives, the better it will rank. This goes back to the last point, though, as videos which get more views oftentimes get more people rating them (generally rating them highly, at that), so it’s really a number of factors which are all connected and dependent on one another.
Video Responses
Video responses are another aspect of YouTube SEO because they help your videos get extra views which in turn should get you more ratings and overall a better ranking/more visibility. I’ll refer you to this post on how to make a video response in YouTube for more information on how to do this.