by samYouTube is one of the largest search engines in the world. Perhaps due to its exclusively video-based content, however, people often fail to think of it as a search engine at all. It may be a slightly different example of one, but just like Google, Bing, and Yahoo, it employs specific algorithms to determine the most relevant content for the terms being searched for.
This means, just like in any other regular search engine, for you to achieve the highest return on your investment, your content needs to employ the Search Engine Optimisation techniques required to be at the top of as many relevant search terms as possible to gain the maximum number of views.
So how do you go about this?
Can’t you just apply the same SEO techniques to optimise your content in regular search engines? Well, the answer is yes and no; the principles are the same, but the way you go about it has to be slightly different. Here are some ways you can go about boosting your video’s search results ranking.
Keyword Research
To maximise results, you should always think carefully about the keywords you are using when uploading your video, as this is how the search engine decides whether your content is relevant. As much research as you can gather on how competitive certain keywords are and how often they are searched for the better. Several tools can provide this information, as well as those that help suggest extra keywords in case you are stuck thinking of possible search terms. These keywords should be included throughout your video information. The title description and tags are input into the search algorithm to determine a video’s relevance to any specific search term. Be careful, however, when writing your description not to include the keyword too many times; there is no need to overdo it. You should only include it where it makes sense to do so and is in context with the content around it.
External Link Building
In a similar way to traditional search engines, inbound links from several quality websites can help improve your video’s page rank on YouTube. One of the most common routes to go about searching for links is to examine who is linking to a competitor’s content and evaluate those who are likely to link to your page, then get in contact and arrange for them to link to your content also. When examining these backlinks to a typical web page, one would likely use tools such as Open Site Explorer to perform a backlink analysis; however, using such a tool on a YouTube video would be next to useless. Then how do you go about it? I hear you ask. The simplest way of going about it is to use the share button under your YouTube video; it will provide you with a link that can then be searched for in Google. The search will likely come up with several references from social media websites such as Facebook, but if it’s a popular video, it is also likely to have been posted on several blogs, which will also be listed.
Aside from looking for who has linked to the video, there may also be several locations where it has been embedded. This can also be searched for by simply copying and pasting the embedding code into Google and searching for it.
Internal Links
That covers finding inbound links from external sources, but what about the internal links from within YouTube that may lead to your competitor’s content? Finding this information is also accessible using a simple Google search and an advanced operator. To perform this search, copy and paste this into your search bar and adapt it to your needs.
site:youtube.com (your competitor’s channel name)
Channel
What this Google search does is look only within YouTube’s domain for links that are directed at that user’s channel. The search results may include a number of the users’ videos but will also include links from other people’s content that link to their channel. So there you have it. If you try some of these techniques when producing video content on YouTube, you should see a big improvement in your current page rank.