As you may by now realise youtube is the second biggest search engine in the world, and one of the internet’s most visited sites. Something like 30 million searches are made on youtube everyday, with 1 billion hours of video watched every day. This compares to around a staggering 3.5 billion daily searches on Google.

Importantly, to get new views of your video you will need to rank it as high as possible for your keywords on both youtube and google search.

Ranking in Google

Google search loves video, particularly those on Youtube. Video is probably the most desirable content for the search engine and will only continue to be so. In particular, Google Search displays video results on searches of the type:

How to, eg “How to build a treehouse”

Reviews of products eg “iPhone review”

Tutorials “Set up my bike’s brakes”

Fitness, sport and animal videos.

If you think about it it’s obvious why – “How to” suggests you want to learn how to do something, and there are few easier ways than being shown in a video. Reviews, tutorials and fitness how to’s make for fantastic video content, as do the ubiquitous and often viral cat and dog videos.

You can find video keywords many ways, one of the best is to use the Google Keyword Planner to find valid search terms. This is perhaps a blog topic in itself. You need to find a search term for your video that gets at least 500+ searches, meaning that it is not only a Google search term but also most likely a Youtube search term.

Build an incredible video

This is the most important point. If your video content is not good, it will not create repeat views, comments, likes and subscribes. You want a video that engages the viewer and makes them want to interact. In fact, user interaction is the main judgement the Youtube Algorithm has for ranking your video for Youtube searches within the platform.

These interactions are:

-video retention, or length of total watched

-Comments by viewers

-Shares to other sites

-Favourites

-Thumbs up/down

Youtube Analytics is good for gauging these numbers, and gives great feedback on how well your video has been received by viewers.

In general, longer videos rank better in youtube search results. Make your content longer than 5 minutes, and if it’s compelling, anything up to 1.5 hours can be acceptable.

The presentation of your video can be helped out by adding a channel logo, channel cover logo, and a cover for each video. These can be designed by yourself or purchased for a minimal price from a service such as those offered on fiverr. Playlists of your videos add to the user friendliness of the channel.

Upload your video with Youtube SEO foremost in importance

Make your title at least five words long, with the keyword(s) you want to rank for as far to the start of the title as possible. For example, to rank for “WordPress Themes” you could use: “WordPress themes for your sporting club site”.

Description is also a key for Google search especially. The text based description is the only way that search algorithms can rate and rank your video. For the description, do the following to maximise your rankings:

If you have a website, the top line is the best one to place a link to maximise your clickthrough rate.

Have the keyword in your first paragraph once

Make the description at least 200 words

Include your keywords at least 3-4 times

Tags

Tags help youtube categorise your video and relate it to some other similar videos – (think related videos in the sidebar).

Views

Youtube views work somewhat exponentially – the more they are viewed, the more they will appear in search results. Also, genuine views are what matters, youtube will not rate or be fooled by bot views.

Getting genuine views –

Leverage Facebook, particularly Facebook groups

Quora – find a relevant question and embed your video along with a relevant answer

Own Website – self explanatory , an easy win

Email signature – again, an easy win

Linked In – on your personal channel or a business one – great way to expose to a field

Google+ this has the advantage of being well received by youtube

Email List – The best and often most underrated way to market

Reddit – great for backlinks

Comment on Blogs – yes you have to build these manually. But you have to start somewhere

Forums – another underrated traffic source