We’ve continued to work on our optimization guide for our clients. While we audit and provide our clients with what’s wrong and why it’s wrong, it’s imperative that we also provide the guidance on how to correct the issues.
When we audit our clients, we’re always surprised at the the minimal effort put into to enhance their YouTube presence and the associated information with the videos they upload. Here’s a breakdown of what we look for when reviewing a client’s YouTube videos:
1. Video Title Your video channel should provide a keyword rich title. YouTube is the second largest search engine behind Google, and also compliments Google Search Engine Result Pages. By far, how you title your video is the most important factor. YouTube uses your video title for both the heading on the page and the title of it. Utilize keywords first, then follow with your company information.
2. Details Once you upload your video, you’ll see that there are many, many more options for detailing the information on your video. If you are after a local audience, you can actually add a location to your video. Fill in every detail you can, it all helps to ensure your video is indexed properly and found!
3. Video Be sure to select the preview image that is most compelling for your video. YouTube partners actually get to set their preview images hopefully, we’ll get to do that soon some day. There are some YouTube hacks out there that describe one frame YouTube pulls for the screenshot, but YouTube sometimes changes the algorithm.
4. URL If someone finds your video and they enjoy it, how are they going to return to your site to engage with you? In your description field, your first step should be to put a link back to the landing page you wish people to visit. Place the URL first so that it’s still visible with the truncated description field that YouTube makes.
5. Description Don’t just put a line or two, write a robust explanation of your video. Many successful videos actually have the video transcribed and they use the full length available to place their content. Having supporting content on any page is important on YouTube it’s imperative.
6. Tags Utilize tags effectively to list keywords that you want people to find your video for. Tagging your video is imperative to get found in YouTube searches.
7. Comments Videos with high comment activity tend to rank much higher than videos with no comments. Share your video with colleagues and coworkers and encourage them to add a comment or two on the video.
8. Views You’re not done yet! Promote your video everywhere in blog posts, on web pages, in social networks and even with press releases. The more views that your video gets, the more popular it will be. And people tend to watch a video with views and skip over those with low counts of views.
9. Video Sitemaps If videos are a key part of your site, you may also wish to create a video sitemap. Video content includes web pages which embed video, URLs to players for video, or the URLs of raw video content hosted on your site. The sitemap contains the title, description, play page URL, thumbnail URL and raw video file location and/or the player URL.
Author: Douglas Karr
Courtesy of www.marketingtechblog.com