YouTube is more than just a site to host your video, it’s also the 2nd largest search engine in the world. Because of this, uploading your video to YouTube can significantly help your SEO.

Today, we are going talk about some tips to get your video to show up first when people search for your content.

First of all, pick a good title for your video. Think of the title as a headline that helps your audience understand your content. Your title should be short and contain words that will capture people’s attention.

You can have up to 200 searchable characters in your title, but less than half of those are shown in the search results. So, make sure your important keywords are in the first 60 characters.

The next important element to maximizing your video’s SEO is its description. Your description is searchable text that describes what your video is about. Make sure the most important information is in the first two sentences since this is what appears below the title in any search.

Your video’s description is also a good place to include links to your web and social media sites.

Another great place to add searchable keywords is in your video tags. Make sure you put the most important keywords first. Use longer tags as they are less competitive and more likely to drive your specific audience to your video. For example, instead of “Video Production” put “Corporate Video Production” that way you’re more likely to be found when someone searches for your specific services.

You can use as many tags as you want, but keep in mind the more words you use, the less relevance you get on each word.

We’ve talked about thumbnails in other blogs, but they are worth mentioning again because the right thumbnail attracts greater audience numbers to your video.

If you have a graphic artist on staff and you’d like to create your own thumbnails, we have more specific information on how to do that in other videos. Here at CN Video, we also offer custom thumbnail creation for our clients.

CN Video also offers a transcription service to clients for your video which is searchable and can lead viewers to your content.

YouTube uses speech recognition to automatically create a transcript of your video. However, since the speech recognition is only about 70% accurate, this transcription is not searchable.
We recommend correcting YouTube’s transcription or uploading your own so it will be accurate and searchable.

Finally, since the amount of interaction a video gets helps its placement in search results, you’ll want to post it where people will see it. Since Facebook has taken over as the most popular place to watch videos, putting your video on your Facebook page will help your SEO on YouTube.

We hope this video has been helpful. If you have any additional questions or want further explanation on any of these tips, give us a call at 314-843-3663. That’s 314-Video Me.