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Top 10 Ways to Improve YouTube Video Search Ranking

In today's blog from Target Marketing Magazine, we reveal ten tips that will lead to better ranking of your video on YouTube. As you most likely know, YouTube has become the second most used search engine in the world. YouTube alone has over 150 million unique monthly video viewers, with the average online video content at 5.6 minutes in length. So today we turn the subject to inbound video direct marketing, and how to organically attract traffic to your videos on YouTube. You’ll learn about ten tools that can lead to clicks to your landing page and the opportunity for you to convert that video viewer into a paying customer. Using these tools, you can ...

Drive traffic to your website or landing page

Build your mailing list

And sell your products or services

There are several factors that will influence how your video will rank on YouTube, or if it will make the “related videos” or “recommended videos” list. Here are ten steps that you, the marketer, to do so your video can rank higher.

1. Your first action item should be to research keywords as you begin planning your video. Use Google Adwords for suggestions of keywords to reveal monthly traffic for specific phrases, and when practical, use those keywords as the basis for your video.

2. Be sure to look for the traffic of long-tail keywords, that is, keywords with at least three words that will be noticed by people who are drilling down more deeply into specific phrases.

3. Use those keywords and phrases in your video script. Google, who owns YouTube, has speech-to-text conversion technology. When you include keywords in your voiceover scripts, Google’s voice-to-text technology will pick them up and use them to rank your video in the YouTube search results.

4. Use those keywords in the file name of your video before you upload it to YouTube.

5. You can upload a transcript of your video voice-over for use with closed-captioning on YouTube. To upload a transcript file, click on Edit in your YouTube video manager. Click on the Captions tab. Under the Add New Captions or Transcript header, select Transcript File as the Type, upload your script and click “Sync.” When uploaded, click the CC button on the video and YouTube will display the words in exact sync with the audio. Bottom line: the transcript file with keywords and phrases will be used by the YouTube search engine to rank your video.

6. Use keywords in the title. Only about 55 or so characters are seen in YouTube search results so make sure your keywords appear at the beginning of your title. And challenge your direct marketing copywriting skills and write your title like a headline.

7. Use keywords in tags. Use as many relevant keywords as you can.

8. Use keywords in the description of your video. The more words you include in your description, the higher your chances are of your video being discovered. You have up to 5,000 characters you can fill, but be careful about repeating your primary keywords too often so you don’t get banned for spam. And of course, include links in the description back to your website. It’s better to start your link with http-colon-slash-slash than www.

9. Generate incoming links to your videos, so make sure links appear in articles, blog posts, forums, and most definitely, in social media.

10. Encourage social signals. Your video’s search rank will benefit from comments, favorites, and likes. To attract these social signals, you’ll need to create a high-quality video and ask people to take those actions on it.

In our next blog, we’ll discuss what YouTube looks for in your video and several other often overlooked tactics that are used to decide how high your video should rank in search results, so be sure to watch for it to get the full story about how to help your video rank higher in YouTube search.