5 Ways to Optimize Your YouTube Videos for Better Ranking and Getting More Views

5 Ways to Optimize Your YouTube Videos for Better Ranking and Getting More Views

Optimize Your YouTube videos for Better Video Ranking and Getting More Views With My Top 5 YouTube Video Optimization Tips!

Every Internet marketer, SEO or webmaster that uses videos to get traffic, clients, customers and sales with want their videos to rank higher and get more views. And there are a number of things to take into consideration how Google and YouTube ranks videos on YouTube and in the Google SERPs as they both use their own algorithm to rank your video before you set out optimizing your video that you need to know about.

Just like bounce rate is one of the biggest factors of where your website ranks online, view time is also one of the biggest known ranking factors for your YouTube video. If your viewers start to watch your video and then stop and exit quickly within a few seconds, your video wont rank as high as videos that people keep watching.

And I would imagine that you have worked hard on creating and publishing amazing stunning videos and appealing thumbnails and titles to get the most CTR from your videos. But let's talk about some ways in which you can optimize the most important parts of your videos which can go on to help them rank higher, get more views and make you more money!

#1: The Title

Your videos title is one of the first things people will see next to your thumbnail image, it needs to contain the main keywords you are trying to rank for. That much is obvious. But the format of that title, it's length and personality of it also plays a large part too. Your videos title needs to be both people and search engine friendly and match your videos content. One of the best things to do to create a compelling title is to use Google own auto suggest feature itself which will suggest the most searched queries around your keywords for you. So if your video is about how vending machines work, then you may want to have your video title as "How Vending Machines Work Explainer Video".

You can also take advantage of YouTube's own auto suggest features for this too. First start with your main keyword or keywords and see what comes up. It will suggest keywords and long tails of keywords for you based on the most frequently searched queries. So if your video is about Battlefield 1 which is a game coming out soon, you'd start by putting that keyword first and see what comes up. This will give you a much better idea about what keywords you should use in your title as well as give you ideas for new videos too.

• Optimize your videos title by putting the keywords in it you want to rank for.
  
• Use Google and YouTube's auto suggest feature to come up with title ideas.
  

#2: The Description

The description area is about the 3rd most important part of your video to optimize next to the title and the video itself. The description area is used in ranking of your video by Google and plays a big part in it. It's the first couple of lines of your description that matter the most though as if your targeted keywords are within the first couple of sentences they will be used in the ranking of your video much more and help the video to rank higher as opposed to putting them at the bottom of your description. This is because Google puts more importance on the top part of your description above the fold. It's also greatly considered that videos with a lot of content in the description area rank higher than those videos that don't have much or any description at all.

The description area is your chance to sell your video. It lets you open the video up to people in a way the video can't do itself. It lets you explain what the video is about, why it was made, where it was taken, by who, by what camera they used and what they had for lunch that day. The description area gives you a chance to SEO the video by adding a very good description in the form of lots of quality content to read that will be informative and useful and nice to read for your viewers while they are watching your video. Also here you can put links to your other social media profiles and website as well but you don't want to go mad and put too many links and shortened links in your description like some people do it looks messy and spammy and just sucks.

It's far better to limit the amount of links you use. Sure link to your site and several of your other social profiles. Put one or two shortened links if you use them to know how well they're doing later on sure. But don't go crazy and add tons of links to your description are just keep them few as less is more. Also the more links you have, the more content in that area you should have as well. YouTube's description limit is around 5000 characters so that's plenty to create a very SEO friendly description for your video. And don't forget to use lots of call to actions asking people to subscribe, like and share your videos at the and as well as videos that do get more likes, subscriber and comments!

• Make sure your main keywords are within the first 200 words of your description.
  
• Add lots of content in the description area and don't over do it on the links.
  
• Use call to actions which ask viewers to like, subscribe and share.
  

#3: The File Name

File names of files are one of the things that search engines look at to know what a file is about. A file named cute-funny-animal-clips.avi or funny-dog-video.mp4 is much more descriptive and helpful to both search engines and people than files that are named mov001.avi or video-001.mp4 for example. So before you upload your video to YouTube, make sure that you rename it's filename to that which the video is about. It could be your videos title that you'll be using or just contain your main keywords as well. Remember, search engines can't see what's inside the video, but they can see what it's about from the file name itself which will go on to index it for that filename as well.

#4: Closed Captions (CC)

Next I want to talk about the closed captions (CC) feature of YouTube videos which are effectively subtitles. Closed captions are what show over your video to your watchers as the video is playing. These help them better understand certain parts of it and can even be translated into different languages. Your caption is used in YouTube's algorithm automatically to convert your voice to transcript. Since closed captions are just text words, you can use them to optimize your video by putting your main keywords in them making your video very keyword rich and search engine friendly. Make sure that you take advantage of this feature which can be a little tricky for some people to get their head round. There is a free online service at captionsforyoutube.com which will make your YouTube videos accessible, searchable, and SEO-friendly. YouTube have provided a Subtitles and Closed Captions help guide which is useful to know how they work and I've selected an excellent video that explains it in more detail too.


#5: The Video Tags (Keywords)

While YouTube looks at your user engagement as a whole and way to rank your video, but the tags it uses play an important role in how that video is categorized and ranked also. The tags you use in your video are going to be the meta keywords for it too. While Google doesn't no longer look at these they are still indexed and an important way to get your video more exposure on YouTube. But there's often a lot of confusion amongst YouTubers who don't understand what the right tags to put are. Hopefully after this you will know better. There are 2 types of tags, both specific and generic tags. And they should be made up of both short and long tail keywords. And they should be made up of what your people are searching to find your video. So if it's a video about how to use vending machines in space, you might want to have tags like how to use vending machines, vending machines, how to, space, vending machine video, etc etc. It's good to put your most specific keywords first and then use generic ones.

• Put your specific tags and long tail keywords first.
  
• Put general tags and important words as keywords last.
  
• Include misspellings as they can often rank high if the misspelling is the same.
  
• Use both singular and the plural of your tags so "Vending Machine" and "Vending Machines".
  
• Use long tail keywords that people search for like "what vending machine works in space"
  

Still unsure about what tags to use? Wouldn't it be nice if there was some free online tool or website that could help you find the right tags to use in your videos? TubeBuddy is a free Firefox browser extension for YouTube creators and publishers that can save you many hours of time and help optimize your videos and help you to engage with your audience and a whole lot more. But it's tag explorer option will help you to find tag ideas for your videos. You can also see where your video is actually ranking for your keywords too. TubeBuddy is a highly recommended free browser extension that many professional YouTubers use to optimize their videos with and yours will be better off from using it too.

As you can see you can put in few keywords and explore many related or similar keywords (tags) that you can use in your video. The ones that get the most searches have the highest number and biggest red bar. Use those as your tags!

So there you have 5 YouTube video optimization techniques that the pros use. I use all these YouTube video optimization methods in all my videos and my clients videos too. And if you're looking to improve the ranking and amount of organic views, likes, shares and subscribers your video is pulling in you might like to apply them to your video yourself also to increase its rank and the views that it gets. You might be surprised by applying these tips to your video just how much you can improve its rank and views.

Cheers and to your success!

Mike.