Perhaps you’ve created a video that you want to add to YouTube, but you don’t know how to make sure it works in your website’s favor. This tutorial will tell you with five tips to get your video noticed by visitors and search engines, and become an asset to your website or business.
Metatags Aren’t Just for Websites
Although most developers consider metatags to be important for websites and search engine optimization (SEO), many don’t realize how serious they are for videos that are submitted to YouTube. The Title is extremely important, just as it is for web pages. An informative title allows people to find your video when they search YouTube, and your title should include those keywords that you find most relevant to the topic of your video. And Google even offers a special Keyword Tool to help you build new search campaigns for your video.
Just like your page’s normal metatags, the Description tag is where you can write a short paragraph that defines the specific subject matter of your video. Again, this will help your video’s ability to be found, so make sure to include some of your keywords, and use specific terminology relevant to your video’s subject matter.
Tags, similar to those used in Content Management Systems (CMSes) such as Drupal or Joomla, are also used by YouTube to facilitate the ability of users to find your video among the hundreds of thousands that are submitted every day. They should be very similar to the keywords you selected when you were creating your Title.
Thumbnails Are Very Important: A Picture is Worth 1000 Words
The Video thumbnail offers viewers just a single snapshot of your entire video, so which snapshot you choose could be vital to how well it performs, particularly when your video is in a huge list of other videos. Once your video has been uploaded, YouTube will offer you with three thumbnail options to choose from. To select which one you think will perform the best click on that thumbnail and Save. And always remember to respect the YouTube community by following the thumbnail guidelines.
If you are finding this article useful you may also like:
How To Add a YouTube Video to Your Web Site
How To Edit YouTube Videos and Add Video Annotations
A Branded YouTube Channel Is a Step Towards Success
Often, having your own branded channel on YouTube can be a real traffic booster. You can create your own channel by starting here. Branded channels are a perk exclusively for YouTube advertisers and allows such added features as the ability for you to add links to your website, it allows people to contact you, share your channel with their friends, add comments to your channel and it also allows you to reinforce your brand or website’s identity with a custom YouTube page. .
Creating a branded channel isn’t difficult–it mostly involves uploading a background image and a professional looking profile picture. You are able to customize the colors of your channel to match the colors of your website, and typical YouTube fashion, they’ve created a video that will surely help to inspire you to want to advertise with them.
Social Networking is Vital to YouTube Success
Once your video is uploaded to YouTube, and you have added the appropriate metatags and have created your own channel following the instructions that we’ve just reviewed, it’s time to publicize your video in the more traditional ways–through links from your website, and more importantly, through the social networking sites such as MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. By sharing your video from your Facebook site, or through your blog, you expose it to more people who can share it with their own friends, and those people can share it with their friends. Viral doesn’t just apply to uberly popular videos like the Gangnam Style video, which has over 2.5 billion views, or See You Again with over 1.7 billion.
Comments Can Be Your Friend, or Your Worst Nightmare
Once you have published your video, and have used the other tips we have provided, your video will begin to receive comments from viewers. Some of them will be a discussion about the video itself, others may be about your business, or even you personally, and others may be spam. While it’s easy to accept the positive comments, and to engage those viewers who have taken the time to respond to your video, it’s often more difficult to remain silent when the negative comments come in. They may or may not be relevant to the video, but often it takes a very thick skin to deal with them in a professional manner. Keep in mind that your replies to those comments, and the way you deal with them, will reflect on you, your website, your channel and your business. Keep it civil, and don’t let yourself get drawn into a debate or argument.