With web video and search engine optimization playing an integral part in the online marketing strategies of established businesses, bloggers and SME’s around the world, we thought it was high time we tackled exactly how the everyday user can implement an effective video SEO strategy on the worlds number two search engine – YouTube.

How To Implement An Effective Video SEO Strategy On YouTube

TRANSCRIPT
Welcome to the online video masterclass. Today we’ll be looking at how to implement an effective video SEO strategy on YouTube.

1. Remember The Facts
When you are doing video SEO it’s important to remember the facts. Fact 1 YouTube is the #2 search engine in the world and owned by Google – the #1 search engine in the world. Fact 2 even though YouTube is the #2 search engine it is incredibly popular, yet it has less results than Google making it easier to compete on. And finally fact 3 YouTube videos actually appear in Google Universal Search and are far more likely to gain clicks than standard URLs.

In short that means that on YouTube you can break into the top ranks of Google and YouTube far easier than solely breaking into Google, all thanks to the power of video. Not bad right?

2. Make The Most of Meta Data
Now how do you capitalise on those brilliant YouTube facts? First of all you need to upload your video to YouTube and get ready to spend some quality time with your meta data fields. Filling out the title, description, tags, date, location are essential to getting your video to appear in the search rankings.

However, that’s not all the meta data you need to fill out. Perhaps one of the most important fields is Closed Captions, they provide search engines with an index of your entire video script, and help open up you video to a universal audience,

3. Sitemap If You Are Marketing On Site
If you are aiming to marketing your video on a blog or landing page ensure that you have sitemapped the videos location on your site via Google webmaster tools. This helps Google index your video and commands it to include the video in relevant search results.

4. Get Social On YouTube
YouTube offers a great array of social interaction for users. You can message, comment, video respond, like, dislike, friend and subscribe users and their content. Being an active user will help to gain your content more views and generate a higher percentage of user interaction with your content too, which will in turn show YouTube that your video is relevant to its large searching audience.

5. Become An Active User On Social Media
YouTube also allows a staggering amount of integration with social media site such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ and Twitter, enabling you to spread your online activity further and get your video content popular on a number of social media sites. By doing so your content will be flagged by Google as a video that users “are” or “should” be searching for, and therefore it will prioritise it in the search engine results.

6. Contact Thought Leaders
Just like with regular SEO you are going to want to build as many external follow links to your video as possible. One of the best ways of doing this is to reach out to thought leads and respected members of your niche and encourage them to share and discuss your video content. This will help you to build external links and whip up more social interaction in the process.

7. Update Your Content
Just because your old video content may have served its purpose and might not be enjoying as much popularity as it once did, doesn’t mean it’s not of use. In fact it gives you a great opportunity to put some fresh life into. Updating your old content, whether it’s a title change or adding closed captions will deem the content as new once again. YouTube will favour content that is regularly maintained on its site and push it higher up its search rankings, which will once again have a huge stake in the results Google provides.

That’s it for today’s online video masterclass. Be sure to share your knowledge and your thoughts in the comments section below.