YouTube has huge potential to benefit your business, its brand and exposure, and perhaps most importantly its saturation in the online sphere. In fact a business would do well to note that YouTube is the world’s second largest search engine. It’s also a huge and untapped traffic and audience source and one that businesses should at the very least consider utilizing. However its also important to understand how YouTube rankings work.

It’s good to consider the fact that YouTube ranks content via SEO means in a manner very similar to Google’s search algorithms. So, lets look then at how you can optimize your video content for both Google and YouTube. The most pertinent reason to use YouTube is perhaps the fact that SEO on this platform can garner you much more search traffic than Yahoo and Bing could.

You’ll need a video to get started

Let’s begin right at the start then. Everyone has a camera phone and the ability to make a video that looks good but the content has to be valid. Nearly every device that you own is likely to have a camera on it so start practicing as soon as you can and better your ability to use film as a medium.

It’s never been this easy and YouTube has never been a better source of traffic. Here are some key reasons to consider this platform:

• There are over 1 billion people using this service
• In 2011 there were over a trillion YouTube views
• Each day there are 4 billion views on the service
• Every minute there are 100 hours of video added to YouTube
• Average YouTube mobile video views per day – 1 billion
• 40% of YouTube traffic is from mobile sources
• Since 2013 YouTube has experienced a growth in traffic of 52.86%

There are plenty more statistics that you could explore but all point to the fact that YouTube is a very tantalizing traffic source. You’d do well to consider this service and how you can utilize it effectively.

SEO and YouTube

YouTube ranks content according to two specific categories. There’s Video Content and then there’s User Engagement and these are the two areas you should focus on when it comes to SEO on this service. The key thing to remember is that YouTube doesn’t work in quite the same manner as Google does.

YouTube’s search engine cannot tell what keywords are put into your video. It also doesn’t have the ability to tell if your video is relevant to the search query (or tags) typed in by users on the service.

Let’s look at how YouTube ranks content so that you can optimize your video better for this video based service.

YouTube’s SEO

The key things that YouTube considers are:

• The title
• The description
• Any tags used
• Transcription
• Your Channel Authority
• How your content is delivered

The above list is the basic way that YouTube reads and distributes content and how the service ranks videos via its search engine function. YouTube’s SEO works with the factors that you can control as a publisher meaning that if you do it correctly you’ll run into very few problems getting your content ranked highly.

Perhaps the best thing about YouTube and its SEO efforts is the fact that you can rank highly without having a good User Engagement rate – it’s all about you and how well you understand how YouTube’s SEO works.

The Title

So you have your video ready to go but before you upload it the first thing to consider is the title that you’ll give it. In any online forum or social media platform there will be loads of content very similar to yours. You need to stand out and the easiest way is to devise a clear and unique title.

The title is where you can sneak some keywords in and it is arguably the most important element to optimizing your content for YouTube. The title will influence the click through rate (CTR) and it appears prominently in the YouTube search result page.

Again though, like with online copy, make sure that your content is for real people and not just the search engine. Don’t sacrifice relevance for a higher ranking in the search results and remember that YouTube (like Google) is all about good and relevant content. So, make sure that you put your keywords in the title tag and that it relates to the content in the video itself – be skilful with descriptions.

The description

The video description box is the only place that you get to really describe and define your video. Users not using YouTube directly but instead through Google’s Search engine results page will mostly utilize this bit of text-based information.

The main role of this bit of information is to increase click through rates on videos and to provide users with some key and relevant information before they access your content. Users are looking for an answer to a question – show them that you have one.

YouTube is a site with huge potential and businesses would do well to explore and engage with the service. Videos are a great and succinct way to convey a point. Ensure that you are uploading high quality content that’s optimized for YouTube and you’ll greatly increase your brand exposure and saturation. YouTube is where all the people are – join them. Increase your YouTube rankings by following the tips we’ve provided.