When asked to name the most popular search engines used today, Google, Yahoo, or Bing immediately come to mind. But YouTube, created in 2005, is a site that attracts countless viewers everyday and is considered to be the largest video based website on the internet.
Creating and promoting videos is a great way to generate traffic and promote your products, services, and special promotions. To be successful, your videos should be ranked high on YouTube and also appear in organic search results.
An even more compelling reason to have videos on YouTube is that they appear at the top in normal Google results. This results a massive leap up in the search rankings! Just ensure that you put a URL at the top of your video description so that when people view your video they can click-through to your website.
Following a few basic optimization techniques will help you to quickly and easily optimize your videos for YouTube.
In order to enhance where your video will appear in specific search queries, there are some basic techniques which can be employed.
Your video should be 1.5 to 8 minutes long. Dialog in the first and last 10 seconds of the video should contain keywords since it appears that some search engines such as Google actually index the audio portion of videos.
The title of your video can boost your click-through rate so make sure your title contains important keywords but also keep it brief. Ideally, the title should be fewer than 66 characters, since longer titles will be truncated in a Google search. A good click-through rate can boost your video’s rankings.
Keywords are also essential in your video’s description. Unlike the title, you don’t need to be brief and can include more information here about your products and services. Also include a URL link in the beginning since the first few lines of the description are visible without clicking through. This can drive traffic back to your website.
Tags are another important area where keywords and phrases play an important role. Some simple research will reveal what tags are being used by the top ranking videos in the YouTube channel that your video will likely be included. Using some of the same tags that these videos have will improve your ranking among similar videos. This can help your video to generate additional views from people who were first watching these similar videos.
These are just some of the ways in which to maximize your return on investment with YouTube videos which can help to increase your online visibility.
