On YouTube, where 1.2 billion videos are streamed worldwide per day (techcrunch.com), there is an increasing competition regarding video content for businesses. Although this may seem overwhelming, there are a few important ways to optimize the rankings of your video and ultimately drive traffic to your site.
The first important way to effectively increase your video rankings on YouTube is to understand ranking analysis within Youtube itself. The following are all important factors to consider: title, description, tags, views, ratings, playlist additions, flagging, embeds, shares, comments, channel views, and subscribers. Although the standard SEO rules apply, there are additional ways in which YouTube ranks the videos within its website. First, Youtube has its own built-in search feature, which relies on keywords in the title, keyword tag and description of your video. In order to be found by individual searchers, you must therefore include keywords in all 3 of these features. Second, YouTube indexes its video content first by search engines and then places them into their database. This makes your keyword choice more vital than ever because major search engines, like Google and Yahoo acquire some of its content from Youtube. This is yet another reason why keyword rich information is extremely important in attracting proper viewers. It is important that you think holistically and integrate many of these elements while working on optimizing your video and site. These are only a few minute changes, however they can increase the traffic to your YouTube video in powerful ways.
While keeping this in mind, you must also remember the 3 main factors YouTube uses when indexing material on its website, which include: votes, bookmarks and viewings. Encouraging viewers to rate your video in the form of votes is invaluable to your video success and experience with the YouTube community because it allows you to track its quality and make sure consumers understand exactly what you are offering. This will allow you to assess how well you have captivated your audience and how clearly your video expresses the benefits and offers of your site. If your video is unclear, it will be evident in the number of votes your video receives.
The number of times that your video has been bookmarked by other users is important for your video because it determines the average rating of your video. This thus shows the video's acceptance level, which stems primarily from your votes, ratings and comments made by users. Since this is all user based information, bookmarking is an important feature to utilize in order to gain feedback and understand how important customers find your products and services.
The number of video viewings by users is also vitally important when considering the impact of viral marketing on consumer awareness. In order for the right types of consumers to gain insight on your products and services, they must first be able to easily hear about it. On YouTube, this is done primarily through the sharing feature on each video page. Sharing and discussion posts on websites like Facebook, Myspace and Twitter are great ways of creating buzz and ensuring that consumers are engaged in key aspects of your business. The lesson here is to never underestimate the impact of social media. If your videos are shared and recommended between users, the number of people who will see your video on Youtube will grow at an unprecedented rate.
After the creation and post of your video, simply putting it up and waiting for responses is not the way to increase ratings. You must be proactive in continuously checking your videos status and effectiveness, while also analyzing your results. A feature known as YouTube Insight is one such tool that is available on YouTube and provides pertinent information regarding consumer access to your video content. Always make sure to remember the general SEO tricks we have discussed in previous blog posts in order to make sure consumers know where to find you and your URL because this will also help give you a boost on YouTube Insight. By incorporating all the elements above, you will be able to create more valuable content, build a network of trust with potential customers and ensure optimal YouTube ratings for your video.