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Video SEO – How to optimise video for YouTube and Google
Image by Rafael Amado Deras
Silicon Beach Training offers Video for the Web training, SEO training and Social Media Training in Brighton, Sussex. We also offer Photoshop CS5 Training so I’ll have to take my own advice and get making and optimising some Adobe Photoshop CS5 Training Videos!
YouTube is the second most important search engine in the world according to Search Engine Watch. High ranked video in Youtube can often mean first page positions in Google’s universal search results. So in effect we need to answer two questions.
- How can I rank my videos in Youtube?
- How can I rank my Youtube videos in Google?
How to Optimise YouTube Videos – SEO for Video
Youtube will use the following to determine your position:
- Keywords in your titles and descriptions
- Number of views, and the velocity of new view
- Tags
- Viewer ratings
One of the training courses we offer here at Silicon Beach Training is Photoshop Training so I’ll use that as an example. Type Photoshop Training into Youtube and this is what you get:
Look at the #1 top result – it has 13, 366 views the second result has 1, 458, 382 views, so AquentGraphics are obviously doing something right.
So what has “Photoshop Top Secret Training Course” got that “Learn Photoshop: Photoshop Training CS3 The Workspace” doesn’t?
Titles in Youtube Videos
- Result #2 has a short title – that’s good – but not good enough to beat #1
- Both mention the keywords Photoshop and Training in their title but result #1 mentions photoshop twice and “photoshop training” together (it is important that your keywords appear exactly in the order that the searcher will type them)
Descriptions on Youtube Videos
- Only #1 has “photoshop training” in their description, this is going to have a big impact on ranking
- #1 uses its target keywords in the first sentence so shows on the page even when the description is not expanded
Include your brand name and keywords with a link to your site near the top of the description
Tags in Youtube
Don’t forget your tags in Youtube. Include your brand name, think about key phrases searcher will be looking for but leave out words like “and” “the” etc
Views and Ratings on Youtube
Well in the cases above both seem a reasonable increase of view over time, so it’s not that that gives it the edge in Youtube rankings. They are important though, you need to avoid is a flat-line in the graph, you need to keep new visitors coming to the video:
If you see your views flat-lining you will need to promote your video. Social Media is an excellent way, and probably the most efficient way of doing this – tweet, blog (see our blogging training and wordpress training courses), use linkedin and/or facebook, if you need help with this why not come on one of our Social Media Training courses.
Whilst getting view and ratings (likes) on Youtube is the ultimate goal and will improve your ranking, they are not necessarily the biggest determining factor in your Youtube ranking as you can see:
- #1 has 13,366 views and 11 likes
- #2 has 1,460,246 and 2262 likes
However ranks and likes and DO have a big effect on Google Ranking.
Try typing Photoshop Training into Google and what comes up in Google universal search?
#2 and #3 in Youtube ranking have the highest number of views in Youtube, pipping Youtubes #1 to the number 1 spot in Google universal.
Youtube Video Settings – optimisation checklist
- Youtube Video Title: Consider your target keywords and any other keywords carefully. You only have 99 characters.
- Youtube Video Description: 5,000 characters is a lot. Write as much about your video as possible and include your keywords and a link to your site at the top so that it shows before the description expand arrows are checked.
- Promote your Video - ask people to rank your video, share and embed your video using your blog , your facebook page and tweet about your video.
- Use your Youtube videoTags: Use search terms you use in your title text and description. Use phrases as well as keywords.
- Broadcasting and sharing options: Don’t forget to set them to public when you’ve done editing!
- Comments: I recommend that you enable comments.
- Video responses: Set this to yes: These help boost views because they are automatically linked to your original.
- Ratings: Set this to yes: These will have a direct impact on your rankings
- Embedding: Make sure this in enabled: Blogs and social media shares really boost views and rating
- Syndication: Make sure this in enabled
- Make sure your video has ‘pull’ – YouTube considers a video “viewed” after eight seconds of run-time, make sure your views hang around that long
Promoting your Video using Social Media
If you haven’t already go a strong Social Media presence you need one! Book onto our popular Social Media Training course.
Links Links Links
The more links you have to your video the better you will notice from the trend graph above in the Photoshop Training search the #1 video has 10 links (that YouTube has found) pointing to it, #2 has only 4 and a lot of broken links. the number of links to your video will improve your ranking both within Youtube search and Google search.
- Embed your video into your company blog and/or product pages
- Post your videos to your Facebook profiles and pages.
- Ask people to share your video you can ask them within the video itself, in the description on the blog on facebook on twitter etc.
- Add your video to bookmarking and listing sites Digg, Stumbleupon etc.
- Include links to your videos in press releases and embed them in emails and newsletters.
Silicon Beach Training offers Video for the Web training, SEO training and Social Media Training in Brighton, Sussex. We also offer Photoshop CS5 Training so I’ll have to take my own advice and get making and optimising some Adobe Photoshop CS5 Training Videos!
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- Social Media Training: why bother blogging?
- Social Media Training: Crazy Cameras and Reputation Management
- Social Media Training: remember the end game
- Social Media Training: is Social Media free?
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Related posts:
- What does direct mean in Google Analytics?
- Social Media Training: why bother blogging?
- Social Media Training: Crazy Cameras and Reputation Management
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6 Responses to “Video SEO – How to optimise video for YouTube and Google”
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New Video for the Web Training Course « Silicon Beach Training Blog says:
[...] See our new FREE resource on how to Optimise Video for SEO on YouTube [...]
24. 6. 2010 at 3:25 pm
David Mahon says:
Nice article, Heather! My thoughts, as requested:
Keywords in the title tag and description are obviously the most important.
After that, it’s more to do with the average rating for your video than how many views it gets. YouTube tries to drive relevance through user reviews.
As for getting it to the top of Google, well if it’s doing well on YouTube then it should do well on Google. But if it’s also being linked to, thus building PageRank to the actual video URL, then it will show up even higher on the Google results page.
25. 6. 2010 at 5:17 pm
Tammy Graham says:
The first thing is to ensure you have a well developed completed profile. If you have not set up your profile yet, than consider placing keywords within the channel name, this will than feed to the URL that youtube sets for you. Though a company should have a main Youtube channel, they should also consider setting up an additional keyword rich channel when they are launching new products or services. These channels should than all connect to each other creating an interlinking keyword rich community. This will increase the likelihood of videos being found either directly or indirectly in search.
When setting up your channel profile, ensure to include as much information as possible. Be creative filling out the about and interests fields, these can become sections about the company or specific interest/features about the product. Keep in mind that the more keywords that are contained in these fields, the more options your video has to turn up in search results, both directly in Youtube, and Universal Google search. Once your profile is complete you will need to upload your video, the same rules apply here. Ensure each video contains a keyword rich title and description, as these will affect your search rankings as well.
Universal search is when you search a keyword in Google regular search, and not only do suggested websites appear, but blogs, news, images, and video. It takes some time for this to happen, as the video must demonstrate that it is worthy of being indexed in universal search and will not be deleted immediately. This is where huge ROI can be seen and where websites that are competitive for keywords can have an opportunity to appear higher on the first page of Google with their video.
If you are taking this much time to optimize your video channel, than you should also consider adding the video directly to your website, as Youtube embed code is easy to add. When you add your video your website, ask your developer to include a keyword rich title tag above the video, and have it coded as an H1 tag. Then add the video embed code directly under the heading. Below the video add a sub heading that is coded as an H2 tag that states that it is a description of ______video: (add a keyword to the blank space) Below this heading add a keyword rich summary of the video, and even though the video links back to youtube, add an anchor text keyword rich link back to the video.
When you add video to a site in this way you are including keywords in important areas of a page that will increase search ranking for those specified keywords, some knowledge of SEO is needed to understand why each “H-tag” “alt text” and other suggestions were made.
Finally, load time. Ensure that the video is compressed as much as possible without affecting quality, and do not place to many videos on one page on your site as this will slow down load time and search bots will crawl less of your content. You can consider adding thumbnail images of a series of video you want to display and have each thumbnail image link to a separate video page. There are also other SEO benefits to this technique.
I hope this didn’t get to technical, as you can see there are many options with video marketing and optimization, your web developer should be able to help you with the technical elements.
26. 6. 2010 at 2:54 am
video for the web course says:
Thanks Graham that’s useful.
Tammy brilliant that’s an optimise video content for the web post in itself!
Heather
29. 6. 2010 at 9:55 am
Robert A. Burns, II says:
Great post. Informative, and the info is spot-on.
From what I’ve learned, the best way to approach SEO for Youtube videos, is to take a comprehensive strategy that accounts for each of the possible factors that can affect page rank for videos. According to the second link I have provided, all of the following factors are important when considering SEO for Youtube videos:
• Video title, Description, Tags, Incoming links, Comments, Subscribers, Ratings, Playlist additions, Flagging, Embeds, Shares, Age of video, Channel views, Views, and the number and quality of sites that host or point to your video
You’re going to need to review ALL of the above to have the most success with SEO. Here are some basic rules of thumb for Youtube videos:
Your content needs to be engaging and CATCHY. In all honesty, the shorter the better. You need to write compelling titles for your Youtube video, and optimize your tags by being specific in what categories you list (in reference to what’s in the video, and more importantly, the title).
Social Media Optimization (SMO) can also go a long way in SEO, and can be a great way to set up multiple instances of your video. If you can make sure to cross-post your videos through all of your relevant social platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, Delicious, etc., more instances of your videos will be referenced and show up on Google.
I STRONGLY recommend you invest in a dedicated text for this, so that you can fully understand SEO in the context of Youtube. “Youtube for Business: Online Video Marketing for Any Business,” by Michael Miller is a fantastic resource in this respect. It should be somewhere in the area of $24.95 or so.
The links below also offer some tips, and the first one features a Slideshare presentation on the subject as well.
Links:
http://www.reelseo.com/optimize-market-videos-youtube-presentation/
http://www.pandia.com/sew/1687-how-to-optimize-youtube-videos-for-top-ranking.html
Robert A. Burns, II| RobertBurns.com | RobertBurnsII.com/Blog
29. 6. 2010 at 1:57 pm
video for the web course says:
Thanks a lot for the helpful advice Robert – this is turning into quite a lengthy list of tips :-)
29. 6. 2010 at 3:40 pm