YouTube is currently the second largest search engine after Google. Over 800 million unique users visit YouTube each month, while over four billion hours of video are being watched each month. More and more companies and marketers have started delving into this new online marketing tool that undoubtedly all these years has charmed both consumers and businesses.
Optimize Your Videos Metadata
What is metadata? Metadata is all the information you enter about a video to help clearly define the subject of a video. In terms of YouTube, the metadata makes up the title, descriptions and tags of your videos.
Optimizing these key sections of your video content will help rank your videos in both Google and YouTube. It’s important to note that content is king – if your video is the type of content your audience wants to see then these optimizations will help further a video’s reach. If your video content stinks, then optimizing your metadata is going to do very little to extend its visibility.
Keywords and description metadata
The Keywords field should convey the subject matter of the webpage or resource. Keywords should be expressed as words or phrases that describe the theme or content of the webpage or resource. Try to imagine the terms someone outside your area would use in a search engine to find information on your WebPages. As a guide
- always choose the most significant and unique words
- do not repeat keywords unnecessarily
- use both upper and lower case letters for initialisms and/or acronyms
- include synonyms, acronyms, alternative word endings, different spellings (eg color/colour; Student and Academic Services/SAS)
The Description field should contain a brief textual description of the content of the webpage or resource. This may include abstracts or summaries, or content descriptions. Use complete sentences and good grammar; some search engines will use this summary in your displayed search results.
Title Your Video Correctly
Write a concise, descriptive title using key phrases that people would search to find your video. Be as natural as possible, but also incorporate YouTube’s Keyword Suggestion Tool as an approximation of how much global monthly traffic a particular key phrase receives. Make sure you choose “exact match” when doing keyword research with this tool.
Make Use of Your Video’s Description
Each of your videos should have a lengthy description of what the video’s content is all about.
Include a URL at the very beginning of the description of your video. Always include a relevant URL to your website, whether it is a specific page or just the homepage of your website, so your viewers can find the corresponding information from your video on your company’s website. Use the full link to your website, including http://
Following the URL, include your most important keywords in the first few sentences of your description because some of your description. This is because depending on the length, gets hidden behind the show more tab. Aim to have at least a 250 word description using key phrases you’ve researched for the title of the video. Remember to keep your videos balanced with use of key phrases, while remaining natural.
Add Tags to Your Videos
The tagging feature is the way that YouTube determines the relevance of your video and groups similar videos together. Adding ten to twenty tags per video is an ideal way to make use of keywords relevant to your video but that couldn’t naturally fit in your title or description. 5-7 tags are optimal and will ensures your video is associated with other videos that use the same tags and help your videos appear as a “related video” when users are viewing other videos. Each tag should be a word or phrase (use mostly phrases), that are relevant to the content of the video as well as the ways in which you predict users would discover such a video.
Why is your video’s metadata a beneficial aspect of your YouTube strategy?
Correctly optimizing your videos title, description and tags is an important way to help YouTube and Google’s search algorithm determine the subject of your video and help it rank in the search results for relevant searches. Again, the metadata is only a small piece of the puzzle and will only help take your videos to the next level if you’ve got quality content to share with your audience.
Optimizing your metadata helps get your videos discovered by a relevant audience more likely to watch your video. The more views a video gets in a short time period of time, the higher it will rank for a variety of key phrases related to its subject.