Anyone can upload a video. But few do it well it seems. It is a pet peeve of mine to see a beautiful video just dumped on YouTube..
Beyond creating a video for online versus other media (which is pretty big) – one has to remember that YouTube is a search engine. The second largest. Entertainment, How Tos, anything with Cats will do well – but attention is needed on five core things..
- LINKS: Add a contextual (clickable) link in the description back to your online reference centre – be that a website or other network. What’s interesting is that many add links but they aren’t active. Ensure you have the “http://” before the www URL address to make it work.
- TAGS: Although I would rely on a good search person’s opinion for a video tag selection, I would start at time & location tags (like 2012, Canada, Toronto), then popular search terms for the topic of the video, then descriptors or quotable titles/sayings within the memorable video. Using the term “best” would be cheating but also indicative that you know how people search on YouTube.
- ANNOTATE: I don’t think this does much for organic search results but it is standard practice I guess to note any music used and give credit.
- TITLE: Really. build. this. for. search. Use terms that are popular. Use YouTube Google ad words tools to see what related terms there are to your title.
- DESCRIPTION: Make it interesting. Explain something about the video content. And double check for relevant key word use within your paragraph.
Finally – don’t wait for views to come. Seed your video – if it is original content worth for eyeballs – submit it to Buzzfeed, to stumble upon, to many of the dozens of sites that aggregate content.
