I often have clients who produce a video to promote their new product and ask for help to optimise it. This means the video has all the correct tags in place to make sure it is easily picked up in in universal search.
Here are a few tips I recommend for those wanting to optimise their videos
1. Title & Description
The title should contain a good keyword phrase , it needs to be short as YouTube limits the length.
The description can be 2-3 sentences and should contain keywords and variations of keywords.
Include a URL link at the start of the description. By default, the description is almost hidden, but the link you create
will still be visible if it is at the beginning.
2. Tags
Include at least 5-7 relevant keywords as tags for your video eg if you have a cake business and are advertising a new cake for Mother’s Day you may want to consider the following:
Mother’s day cake, bake cake for mother’s day, making cakes, cake for mum
It is important to use tags that will associate your video with other videos that use the same tags.
When people watch a different video, yours will be shown as a related video hence getting more views from people
who were originally watching other videos.
3. Provide transcripts of your videos
Write on page copy next to the video which will be indexed by the search engines and help you to rank higher. This will be in the description part. I would recommend you put this under the text
“http://www.bake-a-cake.co.uk Bake a cake shows you how easy it is to make a cake from scratch. Show your mother you care and bake the best cake for Mother’s Day.
4. Offer the option to embed your video
Links from other websites to your website or video, are very important in SEO
An embedded video is when someone puts the YouTube video into their own website. It works same way as an
inbound link. Promote your video to people who might embed it or link to it.
Use the video as a portal with links to related content on your site
5. Keep the video to under 3 minutes. Make it short and concise and exciting to watch !! Make it relevant and
interesting.
6. Allow users to rate your video
The videos that receive higher ratings from users are the ones that users tend to favourite and save.
7. Brand the video with the company logo
This way you are generating brand awareness with your site bake-a-cake.
8. Link to the videos using important keywords in the anchor text – eg bake a cake, mother’s day cake, mum’s cake. You need to make sure the keywords are the same ones you are using on your site.
So there you have it, a few simple ways to optimise your video for Universal Search.