YouTube is the world’s sec­ond-largest search engine, but 100 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. So how can you ensure that when peo­ple are look­ing for infor­ma­tion about a prod­uct or some­thing you know lots about, they’ll be able to find you? A suc­cess­ful opti­miza­tion strat­e­gy will help your brand get the full ben­e­fit of YouTube’s algo­rithms, which are dif­fer­ent from Google’s algo­rithms.

Anoth­er one of the sev­en ways to improve your video mar­ket­ing strat­e­gy is to opti­mize your con­tent, playlists, and chan­nel to ensure that your audi­ence dis­cov­ers them.

The eight YouTube video SEO tips below come with an advi­so­ry: best if used before the next algo­rithm update.

For exam­ple, YouTube offi­cial­ly replaced “view count” with “watch time” as a rank­ing fac­tor in Octo­ber 2012. On the oth­er hand, “rel­e­vance” has remained a rank­ing fac­tor since the ear­ly days (i.e. before Google acquired YouTube for $1.65 bil­lion in Octo­ber 2006).

So, rec­og­niz­ing that some rank­ing fac­tors will change, while oth­ers will remain the same, here are eight video SEO tips that work as of this writ­ing.

1. Conduct Keyword Research

Google Trends has added YouTube search data going back to 2008. That means you can con­duct key­word research to find key­words that work in YouTube as well as Google.

For exam­ple, web search inter­est in “Chevy” and “Chevro­let” are rough­ly the same this month. But, if you com­pare the YouTube search inter­est for these two terms, you’ll see that “Chevy” is sig­nif­i­cant­ly high­er than “Chevro­let.”

2. Optimize Your Content’s Metadata

YouTube uses meta­da­ta – your video’s title, descrip­tion, and tags – to index your video cor­rect­ly. To max­i­mize your pres­ence in search and sug­gest­ed videos, make sure your meta­da­ta is well-opti­mized.

• Your title can be up to 100 char­ac­ters long.
• Your descrip­tion can include up to 5,000 char­ac­ters.
• Your tags can be up to 120 char­ac­ters.

Use every one of these lim­its for each of your videos.

3. Create Custom Thumbnails For Your Videos

If your account is ver­i­fied and in good stand­ing, you may have the abil­i­ty to upload cus­tom thumb­nails for your video uploads. Your cus­tom thumb­nail image should be as large as pos­si­ble, since the image will also be used as the pre­view image in the embed­ded play­er.

4. Optimize Your Video’s Watch Time

Cre­ate a com­pelling open­ing to your videos and then use edit­ing to main­tain and build inter­est through­out the video.

Build your sub­scriber base: sub­scribers are your most loy­al fans and will be noti­fied of new videos and playlists to watch. Involve your audi­ence in your videos, encour­age com­ments, and inter­act with your view­ers.

5. Use Annotations On Your Videos

Anno­ta­tions are click­able over­lays that you can add to your YouTube videos. Anno­ta­tions are a great way to encour­age your view­ers to engage with your video and take mean­ing­ful actions as a result.

The key is cre­at­ing an anno­ta­tions expe­ri­ence that is con­ver­sa­tion­al and inter­ac­tive.

6. Use Captions On Your Videos

Pro­vid­ing cap­tions not only make your work acces­si­ble to a wider audi­ence, it also acts as addi­tion­al meta­da­ta which helps your video show up in more places on the site. If your video is cap­tioned for mul­ti­ple lan­guages, it will also be search­able in those lan­guages.

7. Create And Optimize Playlists

Playlists allow you to col­lect, orga­nize and pub­lish mul­ti­ple videos togeth­er. They increase watch time and cre­ate anoth­er asset that will appear in search results and in Sug­gest­ed Videos.

You can cre­ate playlists using your own videos, oth­er videos, or a com­bi­na­tion of both.

8. Optimize Your Channel Name, Icon, Description

Sev­er­al cus­tomiz­able chan­nel fea­tures help ensure that you’re mak­ing your brand more dis­cov­er­able across YouTube.

Pick a short, mem­o­rable chan­nel name. This will appear wide­ly across YouTube, so make sure it’s the best rep­re­sen­ta­tion of your brand.

Upload a square, high-res­o­lu­tion image to be your channel’s icon across YouTube. The image will appear along­side all your videos on the watch page. (In most cas­es, you can use your brand’s logo.)

The first few words of your chan­nel descrip­tion appear most fre­quent­ly across the site, so high­light your most impor­tant brand­ing upfront.

Final Thoughts

How do I know that these video SEO tips work today?

In Feb­ru­ary 2010, I taught a YouTube mar­ket­ing work­shop at Voyage.tv, home of the world’s best trav­el videos. Voyage.tv’s chan­nel on YouTube had been cre­at­ed on May 18, 2009, but had only 1,510 video views before the work­shop. Today, Voyage.tv’s chan­nel has close to 6.3 mil­lion views. In oth­er words, learn­ing and imple­ment­ing these impor­tant tips helped Voyage.tv go from an aver­age of 168 views a month to an aver­age of 119,067 views a month.

But you can expect two or three of these tips to be out-of-date a year from now. That would be con­sis­tent with the nor­mal rate of change for the YouTube and video envi­ron­ment. So, use them as soon as pos­si­ble.