Friday 27 April 2012

Making Your Post Search-Engine Optimised (SEO) - how to get big on youtube

Sometimes you feel like even if you had a great post/page/Youtube video/review, nobody ever watched/read your stuffs. That is because nobody actually saw it at all in the first place. To make your contents out there more, you need to focus on optimizing your contents for search engines, so that your contents would show up at the top of the search results.

Bing is virtually impossible, and useless to do this as it tries to understand who the searcher is, and makes attempts to get results relevant for only them. This would be useless, again, but you can have a lot of key words, labels, and tags to attract viewers at all times.

So Bing is out, and Google remains. Google is known for its accurate search results, with the reason being that it uses straightforward algorithms to mechanically analyze datas from pages and its servers. So it's unbiased, given that the users turn the setting to 'hide personal results' instead of 'show personal results', because in the first case, it would be the same as Bing if the users did. Crossing our fingers, we get on with our comprehension on the Google's 'The Algorithm', that made Google rise, made Microsoft fail so much, and made Google one of the predominant companies in the world.
Google rates pages/videos(in case of YouTube) in following ways:

Title>Description>Tags

Now on the pages, there is a certain complicated thing called 'page rank' which you probably wouldn't be able to control at all, just because a. It's so complicated and b. It depends hugely on luck.
What Page Rank is that it ranks pages that are more important, more viewed, and more liked and supposedly more people think it's relevant to the search result. The Page Rank system is extremely difficult. All you can do is to keep making creative contents that people would enjoy along with good tags and plenty of descriptions. But make sure the tags are relevant, as irrelevant tags might cause you to lose a couple of people viewing your contents.

On Youtube, there are some extra stuffs that you can control(which is always good)!
The below shows how it ranks videos. As no company can search video by its content, it searches videos by its metadata, so more metadata ensures that more people watch your video. There is an upward limit though.

YouTube ranks videos in following categories:
Spotlight Videos
Most Discussed
Most Viewed
Top Favorited
Popular
Most Responded
Top Rated

One other thing most Youtubers don't do is to add subtitles. Subtitles count hugely when determining the search results, because like I said, no company can rate/search by video's contents, so subtitles is the only way they can know about your video, so it counts highly when rating the video's importance and relevance. By adding subtitles, you get ahead of 99% of the people, because only 1% of people do it.

There is a rumor that comments on videos and pages also count towards search result by a small margin. Don't know if it's true or not, but it is always good to have many comments. There is nothing to lose from it.

Things that are both useful for pages AND Youtube videos:
1. Add as many tags as you can.
2. Google shows results that include the search keywords in the exact order the person searched.
For example, if I look up RFID 2013, results with RFID 2013 will get higher in the search results, compared to RFID...2013 where there are words between RFID and 2013. Also, it means that 2013 RFID won't show up at the top of the search result.
3. LOTS of description. There is no limit on description, so use that wisely. Describe your videos well, along with putting the title across the description and constantly repeating the keywords in the description. Don't spam by putting too much words. Words that are not in sentence and not in order, especially just random array/soup of words and tags, is not gonna work. Instead, you have to be precise yet include all the details and cover a bit broader than your video/content.
4. In tags, try putting very specific terms such as "thunderbolt drive" in double quotation marks. That way, when a person is searching specifically for that term, your contents is the most accurate result.
5. I know this is BS, but you do have to get a lot of views from people to get higher. Yes, this is unfair. But it is better for Google, so just try to stay alive.
6. You need a lot of reference from other sites/videos. Try sending links to your contents to various websites. Share it on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. When it gets on Facebook and Google, it gets you so much more viewers! I once got shared on Facebook, and guess what? The guy with 10 subscribers suddenly got 1000 extra views just from Facebook because some whale just shared it! Reddit is also a good place to share it...That is, only if your contents are good.
7. Constantly create contents (alliteration?) for your increased chances on getting higher on search results.
8. More interactions are better!

So those are the many ways you could increase traffics to your contents that not much others tell. Hope it helped you, and if it did, subscribe to me to stay up-to-date!

UPDATE: I added more info and corrected some of this! Check it out here!

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