YouTube Video Optimization Tips to Achieve Top Search Engine Rankings

YouTube has become a dominant force in on the web. According to comScore, in March of 2008 over 11.5 billion videos were watched by 139 million Unites States viewers. YouTube has become one of the top viewed websites in quite a short time. Google’s purchase of youtube to mp3  shows us how valuable of a tool YouTube is and the potential it has. YouTube videos are starting to show up on Google natural search engine results, surpassing the top spots. A YouTube video properly optimized can outrank sites such as Amazon and EBay. This is an internet marketer’s dream tool and it is so simple to use. This is why you must properly optimize your YouTube videos.

A good starting point for YouTube optimization is to make videos that are short, sweet, and straight to the point. People want instant gratification, not wanting to sit around watching a 30 minute video on how to use a cell phone headset. Videos should be kept to a few minutes to reduce production time, upload time, and download times. Have a script prepared so you do not mutter or stumble upon your words. Film the video in the highest quality format you can. Crisp, clean videos will receive more attention than grainy, hard to see videos. Do not make videos private and always allow for comments. This user interaction can help increase video views and move you up the YouTube video rankings. Using Annotations, text boxes in your video, can help deliver your message or promote your website or company. Make sure not too over use annotations as they can become annoying and distracting from your videos main purpose.

Since the search engine spiders cannot read or comprehend videos you must use the text fields to optimize your videos appropriately. This means doing keyword research and making sure your keywords appear in the title, description, and tags of your video is imperative to a successful YouTube marketing campaign. Maximize on the amount of text you can have in these fields. More text means a better chance of someone finding and clicking into your video. Make sure you use original titles and descriptions otherwise your video will get lost in the millions of videos with similar names. Original content is what YouTube wants to see. The more originality you add the better off you will be. You also want to have a user name with your brand or website name so it is easily remembered.

You have to put everything into perspective to increase views, as the average video only receives one hundred views annually. According to YouTube guidelines there are many factors that influence rankings and can help optimize your videos. These include the video title, the description, tags, incoming links, comments, subscribers, ratings, playlist additions, flagging, embeds, shares, age of video, channel views, subscribers, views, and the number and quality of sites that host or point to your video. You want to interact on YouTube by watching other videos, commenting, subscribing, creating channels, and making friends. Interaction helps with the viral marketing, where one person tells another person about the video. This person tells five others and so on. Doing this will increase your video network and views. All these factor into ranking high for YouTube optimization.

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