As you may already know YouTube belongs to Google and consequently by positioning in YouTube we also position in Google. Both are the most important search engines in the world. Google Inc. has more than one million servers and data centers in the world and is capable of processing more than 1000 million searches per day. In addition, it has positioned itself as the most visited search engine worldwide. For all these reasons, it is very important to get good search results in one or the other.
The optimization of videos on YouTube refers to their positioning as high as possible in the list of results in your search engine, in order to achieve a greater number of visits.
How can we get more visitors?
The first thing we need to know is what people are looking for, in relation to the product or service we are selling. Depending on the response we get, we will establish a series of keywords that we will insert at strategic points when we upload our video.
YouTube’s goal is to show the user the results that best fit his search, i.e. it tracks the words that the user has typed in the content of the videos that exist on the network. That is why it is important to know which terms are the most searched by Internet users, to make use of them and so YouTube positions us in the first results. For example, if a user is interested in cooking recipes, he will search for “cooking recipes”, if our videos deal with this topic, we have to make sure that these keywords appear in the right places. We will be able to obtain information about the number of searches for a keyword through the Google Adwords Keyword Planner tool.
However, with only two keywords it will be very difficult to position, since they are very generic and all videos related to cooking recipes will compete with those keywords. That is why it is better and more efficient to choose 3 or 4 keywords, so that there is not so much competition and it is easier to position. This is known as Long Tail Keywords. For example, to our keywords “cooking recipes” we can add the word “easy”: “easy cooking recipes”. These are more specific terms and we will surely have less competition so it will be easier to position. In this way, our keyword will contain the main keyword -so Google will also take us into account when a user searches for those terms- and in addition, an extra word, so we will also rank if a user searches for those more specific terms.
Where to enter the keywords?
YouTube is not able to analyze the content of the images, that is why it searches in those places where there is text: video title, description, tags and file name. This last field is often forgotten when thinking that YouTube only sees what is visible to users, however, it also analyzes what is not visible.
- File name: it has to be related to its content. For example, in the case of our easy cooking recipes video, the video should be called something like: “recetas_cocina_faciles.mp4” so that YouTube also takes it into account and we add points in the positioning.
- Title of the video: it is also very important for positioning. If you write the keyword twice in the title you will rank better, how to do it so that it is not too abrupt? We can put a title that introduces the specific content, for example: “Cooking recipes: How to prepare 5 easy cooking recipes”. In this way, we position better and it is not too forced for the user or for YouTube.
- Video description: if we have a web page, we must write the URL in the first line of the description, so that those users who have liked our video can easily access our page. Next, we will write a brief description of the video content, in which we will subtly introduce the keywords, at least twice, if possible. The description should not be extremely long, 4 or 5 lines is enough.
- Tags: this section is probably the most important when optimizing, since it is where YouTube searches first. In this section we must write the keywords we have selected and some more: “cooking recipes” ; “easy cooking recipes” ; “recipes”, “video recipes”, “video recipes”, “video cooking recipes”, etc. If we have a company we will also put its name as a label. This option box will appear automatically when we upload a video to YouTube.
- Finally, YouTube offers the option to share the video on Twitter and Google Plus at the time of uploading.
More details to consider
YouTube takes into account the number of times the video has been viewed, the number of comments received, as well as the number of “likes”. That is why it is advisable to encourage users to interact, so that YouTube will take us more into consideration.
On the other hand, YouTube positions videos better in their first 24 hours of life. Its objective is to offer users news and update content. That is why, the more videos we upload, the more possibilities we will have to make ourselves known and therefore to get more visits and subscribers.
Finally, a word of advice: never abuse keywords as you will be penalized. Use them sparingly and make sure that they always make sense within the content and that the user does not realize that they are there and are repeated. It is better to use fewer keywords in a subtle and integrated way in the total content than to fill everything with keywords without sense and coherence.
