4 SEO Tips For YouTube Marketing

YouTube can be used as an effective marketing tool, but you must observe some search engine optimization (SEO) techniques in order to be successful. Sure, it's possible your video could be a big viral success without them, but the chances of that happening are something like winning the lottery.

In these following examples, imagine that your band is called "Emerald" and you want to post a video from a live gig at the Lone Star Club.

Before you post that video, make sure that you’ve:

• Named your video something descriptive. “Emerald at the Lone Star Club video 1/9/09” is good. “Untitled_bandvideo12.mov” is not descriptive at all so your video will never get added by the search engines and your fans won’t find it.

• Choose your keywords based on your title. In this case the keywords would be “Emerald” and “Lone Star Club.” Keep your keywords to 4 or 5 since anything more could be construed as “keyword stuffing” (using every keyword you can think of in hopes of getting ranked by a search engine) and you might get penalized as a result.

• Make sure that your description contains the same phrase as your title. For example, “This video features Emerald at the Lone Star Club on January 9, 2009” is a good description, although a bit incomplete.  Something like “Here’s our band at the Lone Star Club” wouldn’t be as effective because it omits the keyword “Emerald.” The description is critical to SEO so the more info you can add (150 to 200 words), the better.

• Be sure that you put “video” at the end of the title because sometimes people search just for videos.