Improve Your YouTube SEO

It's time for another excerpt from the second edition of Music 3.0: A Survival Guide For Making Music In The Internet Age. This time it's all about YouTube SEO, or search engine optimization. If you want people to find your videos via Google or YouTube searches, but better you optimize your video, the more chance you'll have at it showing up higher in the search rankings.
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"YouTube can be used as an effective marketing tool, but you must observe the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) techniques outlined later in this book. Before you go live on a video, make sure that you do the following:

1. Name 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. 

2. Choose your keywords based on your title. In the above case, the keywords phrases would be “Emerald” (you might want to say "Emerald band" to be more descriptive) and “Lone Star Club.” Keep your number of keyword phrases to four or five, since anything more could be construed as “keyword stuffing” (that means using every keyword you can think of in hopes of getting ranked by a search engine), and you might get penalized with a lower search engine rank as a result. Make sure that your keywords (like your band name) come first in the title.

3. 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, 2011.” Something like “Here’s our band at the Lone Star Club” wouldn’t be as effective, because it omits the keyword “Emerald.”

There are other ways of using YouTube promotionally. You can:

• Find people making creative videos on YouTube and offer them some original music to pair with their video.

• Run a contest to see who comes up with the best music video for one of your songs.

• Run a contest to see who can do the best mash-up of your existing videos.

Also, the more text the body of your description has, the more likely it will be found by a search engine. A hundred words works well but so could five hundred.

These are just other ways to get not only your current fans involved, but also potential new fans."

You can read additional excerpts from this and my other books at bobbyowsinski.com.

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