The Art of Optimizing your YouTube Videos & Channel Organically

Subrat Kar
Subrat Kar is the CEO of VidooMail, a YouTube video email marketing tool for small & large businesses.

Did you know that YouTube is the second most popular search engine in world, just behind Google. Over 1 billion people visit YouTube every month and over 100 hours worth of videos are uploaded to YouTube every minute. Brands, artists & content creators have adopted YouTube as one of the most effective marketing medium to engage with their customers. More and more brands are increasingly spending a lot of money on YouTube advertising, but very few campaigns and channels are well optimized. Here are some tips to optimize your YouTube videos and channel.

Good optimized title relevant to video

The title of your video is the most important thing that drives traffic to your video/channel. Always write interesting and specific title and should not be more than 70 characters. This will be indexed by YouTube & will help you to get visible on its search result. You can use some targeted keywords relevant to your content at the beginning of your title. Your title should be nice so that you can win the users attention to click and watch it.

Keywords for your Video

YouTube keyword research is one of the important part of your YouTube video optimization. Therefore, the keyword research will help you to identify the best performing keyword for your video. You can use these keywords on your title & video description. You can use the tool here.

Description

The description of your video will help you to get higher ranking on YouTube as-well as to appear on search results. The length of the description should not be more than 160 characters. You can use the exact keyword which is more relevant to your video.

Category

Your video should be within a category. Don’t forget to tag the category of your video. If your video is a funny one and entertains people then you can select Entertainment category. The categorization will help you to get featured by YouTube on specific & relevant category that you add. This will also become easy for users to watch specific category videos which they prefer or like.

Annotations

Annotation is a presentational markup attached to text or image or any data. It will help to get people to subscribe, like or watch the nest video on the playlist. To add annotations, go to your YouTube account, click on “Edit Annotations”. You can link to related YouTube videos, channels, or search results from within a video on the annotations. Annotations act just like another CTA button for your video.

Thumbnail image

Great video thumbnail images can attract lot of viewers to your videos to click on it. Just imagine when you see an attractive movie poster you wish to watch that movie. You can use one of the three thumbnail images that YouTube automatically generates after you upload your video, or you can create your own customized thumbnails image to upload. If you create your own thumbnail image then it should be in JPG, GIF, BMP, or PNG format & the resolution size should be 1280×740.

The image should be attractive and relevant to your content. It helps you to get higher CTR. If you have good thumbnail image then you can more number of clicks on it and hence good results. Sometime your thumbnail also helps you to get more search traffic on Google. So don’t forget to use thumbnail image while uploading the videos on YouTube

Transcription

Don’t forget to add transcription inside the video. It will help to people who are deaf or hearing impaired & also useful for everyone, because most of people watch subtitles inside the video who are not comfortable with the language. All you need to create a simple text file with all the words of the video, then go to “Edit Captions” option in your account and upload there the text file. Also it will help your video SEO as-well.

Use social media icons

You can put the social media links of your Facebook/Twitter/Pinterest inside or at the end of video which will help users to understand more about your brand.

Hope all above strategies will help you out to optimize your YouTube video.

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