YouTube Ranking Strategies – Position Your Videos in the Top Search Results
- Comments: 21
- Written on: December 11th, 2007
It’s no secret that video can transform what would otherwise be a bland sales letter, web page, or blog into a dynamic and entertaining communication tool.
But have you ever considered that your online videos can actually drive traffic to your website rather than just acting as added value content?
By labeling your videos with a bottom third, carefully wording your video titles, and tweaking your descriptions a bit, YouTube and other video sharing sites can become traffic magnets that send targeted leads to your website who WANT to convert into clicks and/or sales.
The question is with so many people posting videos for the most competitive search terms, how can you get your video to rank high enough for anyone to notice your message?
The answer is MUCH easier than you think!
Why You Want Your Video
Ranked in YouTube
Well for one thing, you put time into shooting the video, producing it, and uploading it. If no one is watching it you have wasted your time.
If people search for a term and find your video it is much more likely that the person who did the search can be transformed into a targeted lead.
The Magic of the Bottom Third
When you produce your video, use your video editing software to place a URL or other message across the bottom 1/3 of your video.
You have a mere 2 seconds to capture a person’s attention, so make sure your bottom third starts right away and there is no boring title screen that preceeds the video. Get right to it and be enertaining in the first 2 seconds.
After the first 2 seconds, you have to recaptue the viewers attention again every ten seconds at a minimum. Try to keep your video under 2 minutes if possible, but never more than 3.
The longer you can keep your viewer’s eyes plastered to their computer screen, the longer they will be exposed to your bottom third message as well. Feel free to keep things interesting by changing the bottom third from time to time throughut the video, but the main concept or message should always remain the same.
How to Write Effective
Titles, Descriptions, and Tags
The easiest way to ensure people watch your video is to get it ranked for the terms you expect people to be searching for. If you are making a video about Netflix for example, you should have the word Netflix in your title, description, and your video tags.
You should try to make the first 2 words of your title be your primary keyword or words. For two videos that YouTube would normally rank identically, the title “Netflix is the Service I Love” will always beat “I Love the Netflix Sevice”.
If your goal is to drive traffic to your website from your video, make the first line of your description a URL.
For example, write your description like this:
http://www.myurl.com
I really love getting my videos ranked on YouTube because I get a ton of traffic from it. Watch to see why.
When people are watching your video on YouTube, they can click on the URL and have a look at your website as long as you use the http://www link structure.
Make sure that the ONE keyword that is most important to your video (the ONE word that people will be searching for) is the very first word in your Title and your tags. This is important and will help push your video up over the top of a similar video even if it has more views.
Make More Than One Video
When you are trying to get your point across with video, I recommend having one flagship video that will get all of the attention when you link to it from blogs, websites, etc.
Then while you are in your video editing software, make use of some of your extra clips to make different movies that deliver the same message.
Go online and find other videos that are within your niche that are getting views, and upload your video as a video response. Typically the owner of the video you are responding to will have the ability to accept or reject your video response.
Keep in mind that you can only use each mini-video as a response to one other video, so choose your target wisely. Your video response will then appear in a thumbnail just below the original video that is already popular. You are in effect piggybacking on someone else’s popularity – if they will let you.
One last word of advice… As popular as YouTube is, it is not the ONLY video sharing website on the net. Before you put all of your eggs in the YouTube basket, do a video search in the three major search engines to see what video websites are indexed frequently for your niche.
Upload your video to those sites at least. As a general rule, the more places you upload your video to, the more attention it will get. Attention means traffic, and if you are doing your job, you should be able to convert that traffic into sales.
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- Comments: 21
Great post. Btw. What do you think about the new Youtube partners program ?
Thanks for the tip.
I’ll be using this in the future.
I never knew that Youtube can be this useful. Thanks for the tips. I’ll try it out later. I think beside the strategies above, making a good video also is not an easy task. Video camera and video edit software is another 2 big topic to cover.
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This is an excellent YouTube commentary. Thanks Thor for the free advice!
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Absolutely a great article. We have been looking for tips to promote our hot wine tasting game. We cannot hardly keep our product in stock, but we are lacking any video to reinforce the demand. Once we get some video up and people are checking out our game, I will probable want to leave you a comment to thank you again! Peace~ Marc
Thanks for the advice. I really appreciate it and will try to implement it for our scrapbooking website.
Great tips, thanks! Wish I read this before I uploaded my first video :)).
Let me know what you think about
my Software Thor.
Auto Youtube Friend Adder.
To whom it may concern. I can put your video in the homepage of you tube for 24 hours…
Greg, Yes I am interested, can you email me with more details please: blueferrari1@hotmail.com
wonderfull description, would be nice for my project
Great article! It’s really helpful. Thanks
didnt know this, thanks for good tips, will try to put into realisation
People like you ruin YouTube with all your little tricks and manipulations. If a video can’t get popular on its own merit, then that’s the way it should remain. I hope YouTube fixes all the holes in its site so all you vultures shrivel up and die.
Nice information about video optimization. Thanks for good information.
I’m a little confused about the only being able to use a video once as video response but I’ll just play around with it a bit.
Thanks a heap Thor, great info which I will apply tonight.
Great name too!
There was a period when i was using youtube to bring me traffic and that really helps about 1 of every 20 who was seeing my videos were entering my site.
Thanks for the nice post
Very helpful information. I’m just starting to populate my youtube channel with videos and I want as many views as possible. I’m already very familiar with SEO and these techniques are very similar. Thanks again for the info.
video views are important to ranking high, but based on my test it seems that channel views are just as important to ranking high on youtube. I have videos that have almost 200,000 views but only 600 channel views and I am losing the keyword battle to people who have a huge channel view count but not necessarily individual video view count.
Awesome post. I was looking for some good information on where to get my youtube video ranked this one in particular.