The most prominent of these would be videos. When Google bought YouTube back in 2006, it was expected there would be an increasing amount of integration and we have not been disappointed. The prominence of videos on the Google results page has significantly increased for a number of search query categories. YouTube has also received a facelift and many of the processes associated with Google have been replicated on YouTube. YouTube has now become the video equivalent to Google and is creating a huge market for businesses to work within.
Recent reports state that over 5.5 billion videos were watched in the month of February 2010 in the UK and 24 hours of new content is uploaded every minute of every day! YouTube currently has around 48.2 million users signed up worldwide and this figure does not account for the number of non-users casually browsing the site. Therefore there is a wealth of opportunity to advertised your business and generate new leads.
The big question though is HOW to reach your potential audience. With such a wide variety of users on YouTube, you need to find ways of getting your videos to show under the right search queries to reach your potential customers. This is something that is becoming as complicated as getting high rankings on Google.
How to optimise your YouTube videos
Video optimisation is incredibly important in getting your video to show under the right search queries on Google and there is no better way to do this than through YouTube. Currently, the most important aspects of video optimisation are the Page Title, Tags, Description, Number of hits and Rating of the video. In order to access this information, you need to log in to your You Tube account and select edit video. Below you can see the box in which you can edit the page title, description and tags.
The Page title needs to be optimised to include specific keywords you want to target. As YouTube is now using the ‘suggestions’ box similar to Google’s, this will help list your video under specific keyword suggestions. One thing many YouTube videos do not have is a keyword rich description. You have up to 5000 words to play with on each video and this allows for many keywords to be added in, which ultimately will assist YouTube in rating your video ‘relevant’ to the search query term.
Tags are also very important in video optimisation and should also target all the keywords you wish your video to show for. You have 120 characters to play with here so keep adding until you run out of space. These tags should also be used if you are linking from another site to your YouTube video page.
Something which is slightly more difficult to achieve is ratings, hits and comments.
The more people that view your video, the better! This will tell YouTube and Google that your video is worth watching and many people have found it useful. Once you have people watching it, it would be ideal if you could get them to comment and rate. The more comments you can get, the more interesting YouTube thinks your video is, and this will also improve the ranking of your video. Think of views and ratings in a similar way to links in traditional SEO.
One way of getting viewers is to embed the video onto your businesses website. This allows you to reach a relevant audience and also increases the traffic to your website. If these videos are embedded on relevant pages, it will help Google to determine the content of that video. If the page also contains the keywords found in the title and description of the video, it will make your video look even better to the Google bots.
PPC videos on YouTube
Another way to get people to watch your videos is through ‘Video PPC ads’. Promoted Videos on YouTube work the same way as PPC advertising on Google and allows you to pay to show your video for specific keywords. This is brand new and works with your Google AdWords account to generate adverts with your chosen video.
With Google and YouTube changing so rapidly more and more different methods will become available to help you optimise your video and it will be increasingly important to keep up with these changes. Who knows, in the near future we may be able to link all our PPC adverts with our Promoted Videos and provide our ad information through a whole variety of search tools!
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