Tips to Improve Your Video?s Ranking on YouTube

January 11, 2008

 
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I got this information from our Google Agency Services weekly update newsletter. It has some helpful tips if you use YouTube.com for viral traffic. Be sure to also watermark your videos and/or have a URL slide at the end so users can type-in your website address if they want to visit your site.

Tips to Improve Your Video’s Ranking on YouTube

YouTube video search uses a variety of signals to determine the placement of a video in our rankings, including the video file name, title, and any associated metadata. The more information provided about a video, the better it can be searched. In general, we strive to give the best possible objective video result. However, there are some best practices that clients can use that will help their rankings:

* Add a Descriptive Title to Your Video – When users search for a video on YouTube, they will find your content easier if you include an accurate and descriptive title for your video. An engaging title can also help your video stand apart from the rest of the crowd.
* Make Your Descriptive Content Clear and Specific – Try to determine what content your video contains that will help users find it and distinguish it from other videos. Providing content that is descriptive, accurate, and unique is an important factor. Using complete sentences in your description is also a good idea. For more information, you can reference What should I put in my video description?
* Provide Accurate Tags – Including tags that users may use when they search or browse videos also helps. However, avoid using techniques such as keyword stuffing which will ultimately hurt your videos rankings.
* Community Opinion – Our vast and highly engaging YouTube community is an important factor that can affect the ranking result of your videos. Signals from users who share, comment, rate, watch, subscribe to and embed your videos are also taken into consideration when ranking videos.
* YouTube Embeds and Links – YouTube also takes into account links from reputable websites that point to your video. Web sites that are “important” and point to your video may improve your videos ranking. Similarly, YouTube also takes into the consideration reputable websites that embed your video. For information on how to embed videos, please refer to How do I embed videos on my website or blog? Google has also published webmasters guidelines that apply to all sites that embed or point to video content. This document also provides important quality guidelines that webmasters should take into consideration when linking to or pointing at videos.

Using these and other factors, YouTube strives to provide the most accurate and relative video search results. YouTube also continues to modify and improve its algorithms to ensure accurate results and create a better user experience.