5 YouTube Optimizations You Need to Explore

Are your YouTube views at the same number since you last checked? Are your views stuck in the same range as always? This is a frustrating situation for many. Let’s be honest here: we’re not all celebrities. We’re not all giant brands with the ability to quickly influence mass audiences through social media. However, what we can be is a knowledgeable YouTube video manager. There are a ton of tools at our disposal that we can use to increase video views, referrals, and landing page visits. Here are a few you should check out:

1) Video Title

You should use YouTube’s Video Manager application to become the YouTube video manager that you’ve always aspired to become. Simply log into your YouTube channel account and navigate to Video Manager. One of the optimizations you can make within Video Manager is creating an effective video title. A proper YouTube video title should be straightforward, short, and contain relevant SEO keywords.  The brand name should be last if included in the title at all. Video titles have a recommended character count restriction of 66 characters. Say you’re a company named Strike! that sells high-end bowling accessories to yuppies. (Yuppies like to bowl, right? It’s cool?) An optimized YouTube title example would be How to Pull Off Strike! Luxury Bowling Gloves in Any Situation.

2) File Name

This is a sneaky little optimization that can have a large effect on views.  Simply change the file name of the video you have uploaded or will be uploading to reflect important keywords related to your services or the video’s content. For example, let’s say your current file name is bowlinggloves. A more optimized file name would be strike!-luxury-bowling-gloves.

3) Description

Like video titles, YouTube description text should be short and sweet. To put this in perspective, only the first 25-30 characters of a video’s description is visible in YouTube results. So make sure to have your most important information at the beginning of your descriptions. Use relevant SEO keywords based upon keyword research. Be advised, there is an 800 word limit (not character limit), but you should never be approaching this number. Most viewers won’t want to read a long description; you just need to provide a brief hook and context for the video. Any more description is superfluous.

4) Meta Tags

This is a big one. “Meta tagging” is arguably the strongest YouTube optimization one can make. Do your keyword research and pick 10 to 20 of the most relevant keywords to insert as meta tags (or “meta keywords”). Character limits for meta tags are widely disputed in the SEO community, but we say go with the more conservative 120 character count restriction. This is a total character count of 120 characters, so make sure your cumulative keyword count doesn’t exceed this number. Be sure to always include at least 1 branded keyword and at least 1 location keyword.

5)Annotations

In-video annotations (the caption boxes that pop up during a video) are effective ways of increasing views on other videos within your YouTube channel. Essentially, you want advertising text that entices and motivates the user to “click through” to another one of your videos. Use call to actions like Click here to learn more about ___ or Learn more about ____ here! to catch your viewers’ attention. Remember, including annotations can also have negative effects, so be careful. You risk losing consumers if annotations are used too frequently or if tone itself is unfriendly. 1 annotation at the beginning of a video and 1 or 2 at the end should do the trick!

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Do you have any other YouTube optimization tips? Are you a secret YouTube celebrity? Comment in the section below, email us at [email protected], or tweet us @perfect_search! Also, let us know if you’d buy luxury bowling accessories. I think it might be the right time to introduce monogrammed bowling bags to the millennial market—but let me know what you think.