YouTube Traffic SEO, Secrets, Hints, Tips, Tricks, & Guides – From the Source!

YouTube Traffic SEO, Secrets, Hints, Tips, Tricks, & Guides

I just received an RSS posting from SocialTimes.com that referenced YouTube’s Partner optimization / revenue / awesome-sauce website, which is chock full of hints, tips, and tricks!  That’s some fine help and education there for sure!  I couldn’t really save the page in a decent way (barf .MHT file), so I decided to type up my own version of what seemed relevant in this mini-Youtube-video-seo-hint-blast How-To.  Warning: I removed most of the partner features and references as they don’t apply to me or the standard ‘YouTuber’ like myself.

So here goes the show!

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[Channel / Account Settings]

Channel Title:

• Should be something that conveys the content of your channel (see sections below for more hints)
• Should not be just your user name

Channel Tags:

• Be as detailed as possible (see sections below for more hints)
• YouTube channel search results rely on channel tags

Comments, Comment Voting, Ratings:

• Effectively utilize communication sharing tools: allow those sharing tools!
• Comments: The videos on which users can perform actions are more likely to be replayed.  Interesting comments in turn become content, bringing in repeat users and channel subscriptions.  User and comment moderation allows you to filter unwanted comments or display approved comments only.
• Comment Voting (Ratings): Comment Voting allows users to evaluate comments.
• Ratings: Videos with high ratings are significantly more likely to be viewed.

Embedding Videos:

• Allow video embedding in your settings to “Embed” them in various sites.
• Most popular videos on YouTube suddenly gained high volume traffic driven from videos embedded on external sites.

Video Repsonses:

• Allow them!
• Use them to point to the next video

Effectively utilize communication sharing tools:

• Upload videos that generate user interest and involve the viewers
• Promote comments and video responses, rating and sharing, and saving favorite videos.
• Save favorite videos from other users that relate to your channel.
• Send messages to users that favorite your video or give video responses.
• Promote your brand channel on other sites and media.
• Post your website’s URL.

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[Video Settings / Ideas]

Video Titles:

• Formulate full, comprehensive sentences with relevant terms
• Convey the content of your video – not just the fancy title

Video Descriptions:

• be precise and detailed
• don’t forget common sayings
• add generalizations and common typos
• foreign language words
• synonyms, places, people, related topics
• external links, links to playlists

Video Tags:

• repeat the most important words from title and description
• use keywords would you type if looking for content around your video’s theme
• use google search “auto suggestion” to see keyword ranking
• outro should have a link to next video / related video
• “click to subscribe” link in annotations?

Annotations:

• Add background information about the video
• Create stories with multiple possibilities (viewers click to choose the next scene)
• Link to related YouTube videos, channels, or search results from within a video
• You control what the annotations say, where they appear on the video, and when they appear and disappear.

Use Captions and Subtitles to reach a broader audience:

• Captions and subtitles are the dialog of a video in written text format.
• To add captions/subtitles to a video, you’ll need to have a caption/subtitle file. You can use specialized software to make your own files or have them made by another company (which usually isn’t costly).

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Keyword aides, terms, trending, and ideas:

• http://www.google.com/insights/search/
• http://www.google.com/videotargeting/ifa/buildQuery
• http://www.youtube.com/videos

Miscellaneous Tips and Hints:

1. Go Social to drive traffic between all your platforms like YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, blogs, shops
2. Create Content: the more content, the more related video clicks, the bigger the reach, the more revenue
3. Translations for a better usability and better search indexing
4. Post Bulletins for keeping your subscribers informed on what’s coming up
5. Customize Thumbnails that appeal to the users’ eyes (faces draw traffic!)
6. Create Playlists to group your content by themes and which take users automatically to your next videos
7. Link to from inside of your video to the next with Annotations
8. Favorite more videos (especially relevant ones) and categorize / playlists
9. Update and maintain playlists
10. Design your own channel – including background
11. Populate links section on channel / descriptions
12. Make “recent activity” list visible and keep it going
13. Keep people up to date by broadcasting to your channel

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If you’d like to learn more about generating a lot more traffic for your YouTube videos, then see what these guys have in mind for ya’.

That’s it for this richardstep.com wrap-up… now it’s time to implement some of these things!  Get up on it and share this link!