A client asked me today about how to SEO a YouTube video around a term and for best helping your website’s placement in search, plus some additional advice for how to dominate YouTube in general. Here’s what I said.
- Title your CHANNEL something related to your HIGHEST LEVEL keyword – the one that every page on your site relates to.Desi Matlock
- Â Have your SEO review the CHANNEL’s description and fields in general. Lacking that, make sure your descriptions at the CHANNEL and VIDEO level are engaging, keyword-rich and actually apply to the videos in the channel. Make sure that your CHANNEL description includes a like to your website’s homepage.
- Title your VIDEO with a phrase that contains a variation on your keyword — you can be loosely repetitive and odd in YouTube titles as long as you don’t make it unreadable by humans. Â Similar keywords can be used in tandem here so long as you don’t sound “spammy”.
- Add an annotation to the VIDEO that is the exact keyword you most want to show up in search for, applied to the part of the video it most applies to. (if you can’t figure out where it actually might apply, you need to go back to square zero and make a video that really DOES relate to that keyword instead of trying to “fudge” it.) Â By annotation is meant one of those “speech bubble” things. Add another “speech bubble” annotation toward the end of the video with a helpful hint of some kind, that just happens to include a link to a page on your site that adds value to a person who clicks through – perhaps most closely related to that keyword as well.
- Include all keywords you want it to show up for in the “TAGS” for that video (list of keywords that you can provide along with the video) Â – including all the tags used by your primary competitors for that keyword. You can use as many “tags” as you want but stay close to home. Stay relevant if you want longer term boosts in the search results.
- Include a link to your website in the descriptive text about the video, Â in the description of the video. Â This should be to the same page as the annotation in the video or perhaps to your homepage, whichever you feel works best.
- It is essential that you look at the YouTube Insights (statistics about viewer info) for that video – if no one watches the video past the halfway-point and the drop off numbers are too high, then no matter what you do, that video will never make it to the first page for long enough to be worth the trouble to you long-term.
- If no one is watching your videos when you review your insights, you need to make a higher quality video the next time around by reviewing what DOES show up on page one and considering how you can make a better video than that competitor. Look at what your competitors are doing from a critical perspective. Do they use a person to speak as their business face? Are they showcasing unique ideas? Are they including humor? Are they being educational? Are they spoofing? Implement these as you can but only so long as it matches your business model. Try to do one better than the top video. Ignore that video’s numbers and just make good quality.
-  Create specific videos, a number of them, about each of the major segments of keywords for your site, and certainly to match your website’s primary product or service line. Anything you want to show up in search for or have a high-value page on your website about, create a video about.  Make these have as much value-added benefit to the visitor as you can. A Video for the sake of a video will quickly disappear since long term ranking of videos is always tied to viewer behavior.
- Â If you have a high traffic site or a blog, embed links to the youtube videos into article pages or content on your site, so long as it matches the content. At the very least, embed videos you want good placement for into higher traffic pages that you control. This will show Google that your video is not a throwaway, but means something to you.
- Spread the word in social media about your video. Make it easy for people to share videos on your site in social, in places such as Linkedin, Facebook, and Pinterest. Make sure you include VIDEOS into your social media strategy.
- For any videos you’re hosting on your own site, create a video sitemap file (video_sitemap.xml file) and fill in the descriptions and details in full – every available scrap of data, fill it in in full.
It should be noted that once you create a good series of YouTube videos, with a good value add to each of them, YouTube competition is still easier to beat than search competition as YouTube is a much smaller field of competitors for most types of businesses. But it will seem insurmountable if your videos are wasting the viewer’s time – your video really does have to be useful or it won’t help you long term. Sure, you can get a short term cheat out of a well optimized but terrible video. But why would you want to do that?