Do you want to increase the number of people who watch your YouTube videos?
Have you given your videos a search-engine-friendly makeover?
Unless people can discover you, they will not be able to view your videos or subscribe to your channel, which will negatively impact your search ranking.
In this post, you’ll learn 5 tips for optimizing your videos so that they appear higher in YouTube search results.
Also Read: How Social Sharing Helps to Boost Websites and Blog!
1. Select Keywords with a Lot of Search Volume.
You’re well aware of the significance of keywords in search engine optimization. Choosing the proper keywords may be the difference between having great visibility and being buried on page five of the search engine results pages (and you know nobody gets all the way to page five).
In spite of the fact that YouTube can perform a lot of things, it is unable to scan the content of your video for keywords, which means you will have to add them manually. If you need help selecting the most appropriate keywords, you may utilize the YouTube Keyword Tool to see which ones have less competition.
Your keywords help YouTube in determining whether or not your content is relevant, and they also help your audience in understanding what your video is about. Ensure that your title, description, and tags contain these keywords and phrases.
As a general guideline, use about ten tags that contain the video category, video content, shoot location, and the names of any people who appear in the video, as well as the video title.
2. Use keywords in the title of your video
Your video’s title should provide viewers a clear indication of what they may anticipate to see in the video. That can be more difficult than it appears.
Is your title very long? People lose interest in you and begin to disregard you. Is your title a little too brief? People don’t know if that’s what they’re searching for, so they ignore you until they figure it out.
In an ideal world, your title would be approximately 120 characters long—enough to inform viewers what they’re viewing, but not so much that they miss out on the rest of the title.
For example, a film named My Cat will not truly capture the attention of viewers because it is inherently boring in nature. Because, let’s face it, how many cat videos have you watched in your lifetime?
Users are more likely to click on a title that provides a more accurate description of the video’s content, such as My Cat Trying to Eat a Shoe.
When creating your title, include a keyword phrase at the top of it, especially if you’re writing a series of articles. To give you an example, “Healthy Cupcakes: Gluten-Free Bananas Foster,” “Healthy Cupcakes: Sugar-free Cinnamon,” “Healthy Cupcakes: How to Avoid Cracked Tops,” and so on.
3. Include keywords in the description of your video
When composing your video description, organically incorporate your important keywords into the text. You’ll be OK as long as the description is natural and does not seem forced.
If you overuse your keywords in a spammy manner (which is referred to as “stuffing” and is considered poor practice), you will harm your chances of moving up YouTube’s search engine results pages.
The description in the following example makes use of a number of keywords, yet they all function well together without being forced.
Make sure to add a link to your website or blog in the description of your video when you’re writing it. A YouTube link to your website is regarded a backlink for the purposes of Google search engine ranking (which means more Google juice for your website).
The description of a YouTube video is usually chopped off at the third line, so make sure to include the URL at the start of the description before posting it.
4. Personalize the Video Thumbnail
The thumbnail for your video serves as the video’s face. As the first thing viewers see when your video appears in search results, it must be visually appealing and compelling.
Customized video thumbnails consistently outperform YouTube’s default snapshot in terms of viewer engagement. Grainy snapshots from the midst of your video don’t build confidence in viewers that your video is the one they should watch and subscribe to.
Take the time to design a unique, eye-catching thumbnail that accurately represents the subject matter of your video. Your thumbnail should have a dimension of 1280 x 720 pixels and an aspect ratio of 16:9 for the best effects.
5. Make use of video hashtags to increase the visibility of your videos on YouTube
Hashtags (#) are increasingly being used on social media to help users in finding content that answers their queries across a variety of platforms. It is possible to use related hashtags (#) in video descriptions in order to help viewers in finding your video when they search for a certain hashtag.
Tags, in particular, help in the advancement of search since they make significant trends more evident. Once you’ve included a hashtag in the video description, it will be shown above the video’s title and will then be hyperlinked to the hashtag’s source.
It’s also crucial to keep track of where you’ve included video hashtags in this section. If you include a hashtag in the video title, any hashtags from the description will not be displayed around the video title until you remove the hashtag.
You can drive even more attention to your video by advertising it across all of your social media platforms, allowing it to reach as many viewers as possible.
Making your video accessible from a variety of channels increases the likelihood that influencers will discover your video and, with luck, promote or source it on their own platforms. Links and embeds inform YouTube (and Google) that your material is popular, which elevates you up the search engine results page (SERP) ladder and into more prominent YouTube search results.
The Bottom Line
It makes a significant difference in your YouTube traffic and success if you choose the proper keywords, include them into your title, description, and tags, and customize your video thumbnail, all of which can be done in minutes.