Do YouTube? Optimize your web videos for top ranking
YouTube has always been a fun, social networking tool, and still is. However now that Google has taken on ownership of YouTube the opportunity has opened for businesses to profit from sharing their videos with the YouTube community. What better way to launch a product or advertise your services than in a community with millions of viewers daily? It is now an internet marketers dream tool, however how does someone get their web video ranking well? Google includes YouTube search results into natural Google search engine results so it pays to know how to get your web videos ranking well.
Get to the point!
Ok, guilty as charged, but my attention span is really, really short when flipping through the internet scouring for interesting things to read or watch. Therefore if you are going to have a video online, it has to be presented well. The ‘quick shoot on my home video camera’ web videos that many YouTube users broadcast may be quick and easy to shoot and upload, but unless it is a home video message for family and friends it is highly unlikely that others will stay around to view it. It has to be catchy, short (running from 1 to 3 minutes), well thought out and straight to the point. You may consider hiring a video professional to put your web videos together for you.
The visual quality of your web videos is also important for the best first impression. YouTube now supports high definition video, meaning that the quality that the end user sees is better than many television sets! Take advantage of this by ensuring a high definition format (HD or HDV) is used to shoot and deliver your message.
No privacy here
Well that’s obvious – if you want viewings, make sure your web videos aren’t set to private. If it is private, you will miss out on the mass of your viewing audience. You also need to accept comments. You can quickly delete any unwanted comments (you get emailed, so don’t worry about missing comments). This can increase views and move you up the Google rankings.
Search Engine Spiders can’t read your video
One day the technology may exist for search spiders to understand the content of web videos, but at this point they are limited to scouring the internet for text. This means doing keyword research and making sure your keywords appear in the title, description and meta tags of your video. This is very important to ensure a successful campaign.
Use original titles and descriptions as this is what YouTube users want to see – fresh, original content. If you use key phrases that a million other users are using, it will quickly get lost in the crowd. You’re best to target a niche market with a few thousand people searching with little competition than targeting a few million people that won’t ever see your video listed. If you have the budget, a quick search engine optimization should really help.
Factors to consider
There are many things that can influence your rankings and help optimize your videos:
- Video title
- Description
- Tags
- Incoming links
- Comments
- Subscribers
- Ratings
- Play list additions
- Flagging
- Embeds
- Shares
- Age of video
- Channel views
- Views
- The number and quality of sites that host or point to your video
Make friends
Interacting on the YouTube community by watching other videos, subscribing, commenting, creating channels and making friends all aides in showing that you’re a valuable member and not a spammer of the YouTube community. It also aides in the ‘viral’ effect of the video where your video will quickly be shared amongst your community members – a definite help towards boosting your YouTube rank.
Embed your video
If your video is viewed on another site, this counts as a view on your YouTube video. The best way is to either embed it into your own website or an affiliate website. You can use blogs to post your videos, but in any case ensure that the content on the site you embed your video is relevant to your video. Ideally you would link to your videos with the same keywords that are in your video.
A couple of suggestions…
Ok so where do you start? For starters you can…
- Send out an email campaign to all of your contacts (in a very short space of time) notifying them of your new video. I recommend MailChimp as a third party mailing company so you can track how many people have clicked the link to your video and its effectiveness.
- Place your video on your own website and other websites (as discussed above)
- Get involved in the YouTube community and build a following of people.
The ultimate is to be featured in the YouTube spotlight – watch the views come rolling in then!
Submission Tools
You can also use sites like the Tube Mogul and Traffic Geyser to get some extra views. These tools submit your video to many major sharing sites meaning you don’t have to! Whatever you do, don’t subscribe to any tool that will offer to sign you up for hundreds of YouTube accounts so you can vote on your own video. This is spamming and can lead to your accounts (including your main account hosting the video) to be permanently banned from YouTube.
Making Money from your videos
If you’re getting the views on your video, why not make some money off it? Just set up an AdSense account in combination with YouTube. You’ll then receive money every time someone clicks and ad that will appear next to your video.
How we can help
The ProMojo team are experts in creating engaging web videos on YouTube. With the permission of our clients every video is posted on our YouTube channel and we can also spend time researching keywords that will get the best results for your video. All our videos are produced in High Definition meaning 10 times the quality of a standard DVD and a quality that YouTube can deliver to your viewers. Check out our YouTube channel, and don’t forget that subscribing to channels can help your ranking, so make sure you subscribe to ours and be notified of new videos we have added.
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