How to Optimize Videos in You Tube

We always talk about Google and how much traffic Google search can drive to our website but how much time do we spend on thinking how we can use the various other Google channels to drive traffic? Besides the web search Google provides various other search channels that can drive an equal amount of traffic and one such highly potent traffic driver is YouTube.

Trust me YouTube can drive enough traffic to your site to get your servers to crash. Many of us post videos to YouTube but never bother to optimize them and some of us don’t even care to add videos to YouTube.

Take my words for it, if you know how to optimize for YouTube it can be a great source for good traffic. In this article we will look at some tips for optimizing for You Tube.

a) Use a proper Title for the video. Do a little keyword research before you write the title, make sure it makes sense and yet contains the keywords. Make it Short and Crisp.

b) Write a Description that is actually descriptive. Keep in mind that search engine’s can’t read video content, so this description would help it understand the video.
c) Use the word “Video” in Title and Description. People often search for keywords with the word “video” as a suffix

d)Do not disable comments. Enable all the features like video responses, ratings, embedding, syndication etc to encourage community participation. Reply to comments if applicable

e)Add applicable tags for the video

f) Add a link to your website in the description

g) Make sure you mention your link in the video at the end of the show, particularly if it is a teaser

h)Embed the video in external websites wherever applicable

i) Add a few links from external websites to the video page with suitable keyword anchor text

Why Should You Do All These ?

a) Traffic from YouTube

b) With the Universal Search being adopted by all major engines, if you can optimize your video properly it might rank for competitive keyword. Now think what does that mean ? It means you will basically have an image/video placement on Google ( because Google displays video thumbnails in SERP ) or your target keywords while your competitors would have the normal listing and we all know how much more attractive images can be compared to those stale text search results.

Here is an example…