Get the Most SEO Out of YouTube

So, you’ve made a music video. It’s got a great new sound, slick editing, and you’re ready to make it the next YouTube sensation. But that’s not going to happen if your video just gets lost in the flood of new uploads that hit the Web every day. So what can you do to make sure that you get noticed?

It all comes down to presentation. That means paying attention to all those little details that your viewers will hopefully skim right over if you do your job right. Dotting the right i’s and crossing the right t’s can make all the difference when YouTube ranks your video, though.

Just like Google, the key to getting your video found is SEO (search engine optimization). First, you have to decide which keywords work best to describe you, your music and your video, and the best way to work them in.

Five different things factor in to the ranking YouTube gives your video: Its title, its description, how many views it has, the user rating, and your tags. If you have a lot of views, you’ve probably already done a good job of optimizing your video, and the rating will depend on what those viewers think. The rest, though, is completely in your control.

Your title is probably the most important thing you can control. You’ll want to include your artist name so your fans can find the video, and including the word “video” can help a lot too, especially when it comes to getting exposure with people performing Google searches. For live videos, including the date and the location can let people who saw your band that day track you down. And it can help to include a couple words describing your band or the music you play, since a search for just your band name could turn up some pretty random results.

The video description should answer whatever questions you can expect people to have — usually something like, “What’s this video about?” When your video comes up in the YouTube search results, it will only display the first 30 or so characters, so make sure you get to the point, and use something that’ll grab people’s attention. Make sure your description actually describes your video, though; people who think they’ve been fooled are more likely to give you a bad rating, and that can cancel out any good your description is doing. Adding a link somewhere in the first couple sentences of your description can be a big help, too.

Finally, think about the tags you attach to the video. Including the right words or phrases can help your page get search engines’ attention without turning your title into a crazy run-on sentence. The more unique your tag words and phrases are, the higher you’re going to rank when somebody searches for them, so the trick is to find tags that not many videos are going to use, but that people who might like your video are probably going to search for. Obvious one-word tags like “rock” or “music” won’t get you much attention because so many people will be using them, but there’s no limit to how many tags you can use. So go crazy.

Doing all this takes a little bit of thought, but not a lot of time. Once you’re done, though, your video is set to get in front of as many eyes as you can. From there, it’s just a matter of building up your reputation. If people like what they see and they give you good ratings, then you’re off to the races.