If a campaign has more than one video (perhaps different content, or as part of a series), Channels are vital for bringing all the assets together in one place, allowing casual viewers who come across a video on their daily internet travels to discover more related content. These genuinely engaged users are often the key to campaign success, so making their journey as easy as possible is crucial.

I recently came across this article on optimising your YouTube channel for SEO, from SEOptimise.com. It gives some great tips, which should help advertisers and brands improve their YouTube channel search-ability. I’ve outlined the main points below, but it’s definitely worth checking out the full article.

- Pick descriptive title tags – it’s important to think beyond the video content itself, and consider adding more descriptive tags in addition (e.g. with a music video – what genre?)

- Link internally with Video Responses and Playlists – making Google indexing more effective

- Use annotations – to encourage ratings and comments – Comments are not only useful for SEO, but also important for measuring campaign sentiment and engaging with viewers.

- Build external links, and link from your video description – YouTube has a character limit of 27 in the description before it’s shortened with ‘…’ – adding a link to your external site (perhaps a campaign microsite) within this limit will help drive traffic from the video.

Some SEO basics

• – Google loves content

• – Google loves relevant content

• – Google loves well-structured content

• – Google loves very focused content

• – Google loves content that is loved by other people (i.e. content that is linked to)

• – Google loves content that is loved by popular people

• – Google loves content that is connected to other popular people

What this means when you blog – 11 tips on optimising for SEO

• 1) Write content that is very focused and relevant.

• 2) Make sure your blog post has a tight focused title – always thinking “what terms / question / phrase would someone search for?”  For example, if you’re wanting to target keen bloggers, then they’re always interested in finding out “how to optimise the seo of my blog” – so give it as the title of your post!

• 3) Make sure that the link of the blog post (which is often auto-generated from the title of the blog post) contains the relevant search terms.

• 4) Make sure the opening paragraph repeats those key phrases – as the opening 30 or so words are the ones are judged as being particularly important.

• 5) Make sure you you link key words / phrases in your blog, to key pages in your site.  For example if you write “Viral seeding is an effective way to gain brand awareness“.  Link the words “Viral seeding” to the relevant page in your site you’re trying to optimise.

• 6) Keep repeating key phrases and terms throughout the blog post, and remember to do the relevant linking.  Don’t go over board though – as this may look like SPAM to Google’s bots.

• 7) Include other relevant content in your blog posting – so maybe include a relevant YouTube video, or post a relevant (and tagged) image.  This all adds to the richness and relevance of the blog.

• To show your blog post is connected and influential, drop is some links to other more influential sites.  e.g. You may link to the Brand Republic site, if you’re talking about advertising – to indicate that you’re connected to other sites.

• 9) Once you’ve written your blog, make sure it’s linked to by other sites.  N.B. the more influential the site linking to you, the better.  So for example, Digg the blog via Digg.com, or link to the blog from another blog – e.g. the Team Rubber blog.  To do this you might do a weekly blog round up of the best Team Rubber postings.  You should also obviously Tweet the post – to optimise the opportunity for the blog being picked up by others.

• 10) Finally – remember to write interestingly and well.  After all, much of the success of your blog post will be down to the how people enjoy and share your blog / content.  If people think it’s great, then they’ll do the link sharing for you!

• 11) Finally #2 – consider how someone might find your post out of context, and make sure it ends with the right kind of call to action – e.g. you might write an end line along the lines of “If you’re interested in this, then you may be interested in the Viral Ad Network, which provides great fun ads for the best blogs and sites.  Check it out our Viral Ad Network here!“

Personally I feel that this is one of the great differentiators between our advertising network and the bulk of online advertising – that our content is often so enjoyable that you can place it as the centre point of a blog post or article, and drive traffic to your site just to view it.