If you’ve spent some time researching how to market your business online, you’ve probably heard about video marketing. And maybe you’ve even gotten so far as to create one or two videos and uploaded them to YouTube. But creating and uploading a video are only a small part of video marketing. Before you even upload that video, you need to be thinking about how to best optimize your video so that it will be seen by more people.
Here’s some quick tips to keep in mind to make your video more visible on YouTube.
Of course, the number one tip I can give you is to create a quality video, one that is interesting, informational, and will catch people’s attention. If your video is all promotion, isn’t well put together, doesn’t engage people, it won’t matter how much you optimize. You’re just not going to get good results.
Before you start filling in your title, description, tags, etc. – you need to do some keyword research to find keywords that people are searching for on YouTube. I recommend you use the YouTube keyword analyzer found at YouTube, because when you use keyword research tools like WordTracker or Market Samurai, you’re not going to get accurate information that’s relevant to YouTube searches. Once you’ve done your research, take the keywords you find and include them in the title, description and tags for your video, which will help increase the visibility (views) of your video.
If you don’t know where to start your keyword research, here’s another tip. Search for videos related to the topic of your video and see what tags are used in the top videos that come up. This will give you some good keywords and keyword phrases to get you started.
Once you’ve gotten your keywords down, you’ll want to use those appropriately when uploading your video to YouTube.
Your video’s title and description.
This is one of the most overlooked ways to getting traffic to your video. Your title needs to contain a good keyword phrase which will also fit within the limits YouTube sets for the length of your title.
One simple way many people don’t think of to get people back to your website from your video, is to always begin the “description” of your video with the full URL (samplesite.com). This way people can click directly to your website from the description. Make it simple and easy to get even more people to click over to where you really want them – on your website. And again, after the URL, be sure to use your keywords in the rest of your description.
Tags
You want to set up highly searched and relevant keywords as tags for the videos you upload. By using the right tags, your video is more likely to come up as an associated video. What this means is that when someone is watching another video, your video can then show up as one of those related videos that come up on the right side of your screen. By making sure your video has the right tags to show up next to similar videos, you can get even more people to see your video.
Inbound Links/Embeds
With YouTube, when someone embeds your video, it counts as an inbound link. If you know anything about SEO, you know that inbound links can really bump up your SEO power. So by getting more people and more websites to not only link to your video, but also to embed it, your video will rank higher in search engine results, again increasing how many people see that video. So you want to be sure you not only let people know about your video, but that you also ask people to link back to it and to embed it. You can help with the inbound links yourself by making sure you embed your own video on your Facebook profile, Facebook business page, Twitter, your website, your blog and anywhere else you can think of.
Ratings & Comments
The better ratings and more comments your video has, the more people are likely to view it. So again, proactively work on getting people to interact with your video. The number one way to do this is like I mentioned earlier – making quality, impactful, informational videos. But you can go even further with this, by reminding your blog readers, your Facebook friends and fans, your Twitter followers, and anyone else you’re connected with, to not only view your video – but to take it a step further, and rate it and comment on it.
By taking into account the many different ways you can actively impact how many people view your video, you’ll take your video marketing to a whole other level that many small business owners don’t even think about.