Making sure your YouTube videos Rank
Optimizing your YouTube videos is more important than ever. Google often ranks videos on the first page of their traditional SERPs. The extent to which it does so varies by subject and algorithm update, but overall, the trend has been to rank YouTube videos and other parasite pages. Furthermore, YouTube is essentially the second most-used search engine after Google. So if you’re taking the time to upload videos with the intention of having them found, it’s a good idea to take a little extra time to make sure they are optimized.
When it comes to ranking, make full use of:
Title
Ignoring this is like ignoring both your Title and H1 tag. Make sure you summarize the subject of your video and do so using words people actually search (as opposed to “industry insider” nomenclature, unless of course, that’s who the video is made for).
Description
Don’t skimp on your description with a meager sentence or two. Try and have at least 300-400 words of descriptive and helpful content that includes keywords and associated words and phrases.
Tags
Make sure you include all relevant keywords/phrases as tags. This isn’t WordPress, where each tag creates a new page with some level of duplicate content, so don’t feel limited to a handful.
Transcription
It’s a good idea to transcribe your videos (YT/Google crawls/indexes this content) and paste it into your description. You can actually cut down on a lot of work by using the Closed Captions feature to transcribe your video.
In your Video Settings, click Captions, then Automatic Captions.
You will see a timeline of text that should match your video (the accuracy will vary generally depending on the quality of the voice audio)
Click Actions, then Download.
Choose VTT and open the file in Notepad
You will see a Caption text, along with step numbers and timestamps which you’ll want to remove, in order to leave only the text. To remove the text, I generally paste the text into and excel sheet and simply highlight and delete the delete non-textual rows, then paste the text back into notepad, and reformat the text to make it easier to read (by default it will be separated, with each line containing only a few words).
Marketing your YouTube Page(s) and Video(s)
While it goes without saying, you’ll want to link to and share your YouTube channel and videos where appropriate. If these videos match something on your website and add value (for example, a product review or guide for a product on your website) then make sure and include the video on the relevant page. If the video is something your followers may enjoy or benefit from in some way, make sure you share the video.
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