Bristol Cycle Festival

YouTube is by far the most well established video-hosting platform on the market and with Google now including YouTube videos on their main search results pages, it’s essential to get the SEO right if you want your video to be noticed.

Over 13 million hours of video were uploaded to the site last year alone and competition for views is higher than ever, so we’ve put together a few handy tips on how to optimise your video to give it the best chance of being found…

1 – Titles & Descriptions:

Yes it sounds obvious but worth a mention, try and use as many relevant keywords as possible in your title as it’s the first thing people will read when skimming through search results.

It’s important to spend time writing the video description because it will show up both in YouTube and Google search listings. You should try and repeat relevant keywords again here, (being careful to avoid keyword stuffing). Remember that only the first few words will be shown in search results but keywords from the additional text will be detected and help make your video more easily searchable.

2 – Keywords:

Think carefully about the keywords that are most appropriate and do some research to find out what search terms are popular. YouTube have a handy Keyword Tool that allows you to view search volumes for individual words, analyse the demographics of people searching for them and generate suggestions. Avoid the temptation to include words simply because they are popular if they don’t have a direct relation to your video, it may result in an initial traffic boost but you will end up with high bounce rates which will tell YouTube to make your content less visible.

3 – Video Thumbnail:

Choosing a good thumbnail image for your video can dramatically increase the chances of it standing out. We’ve all heard of the expression ‘judging a book by its cover’ and rightly or wrongly that’s exactly what people do on YouTube. When presented with a list of thumbnail video images, viewers tend to skim down the first page and pick those with the most striking pictures.

After uploading your video you will have 3 thumbnails to choose from. These images are not randomly selected but calculated on fixed positions within your clip so it’s possible to manipulate the video to control your options.

You can calculate the exact position of your thumbnails by following the equation below…

X = Video length (in seconds)

Y = X divided by 4

Y is the 1st thumbnail.

2 x Y is the 2nd thumbnail

3 x Y is the 3rd thumbnail.

If you find that a bit too much to think about in advance you can always tweak your video directly in YouTube and see how your edits effect the thumbnail images selected.

4 – Links:

Google will use the number of links to your video to determine its position in the search rankings, so you should create links everywhere you can. Use your website, write comments with links on relevant blogs, you can even build up links within YouTube itself by creating video responses to other relevant clips, (again be careful not to over do this or it might be identified as spam). Don’t forget to leverage social media sites and post regular updated links on Twitter, Facebook and other services and make sure you enable embedding so other people can post your video on their sites.

A really good way to boost the number of links to your video is to use a seeding service like the Viral Ad Network which will distribute your video and links across hundreds of blogs encouraging the viral sharing effect to really get your clip noticed!

5 – Be aware of user signals:

YouTube want to keep viewers engaged with its content, so in order to make the most relevant videos more easily searchable it uses an algorithm that tracks user interaction.

It’s worth keeping in mind some of the following signals that it takes into account…