Take Advantage of the Second Largest Search Engine: YouTube

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YouTube isn’t just for videos; YouTube has become a resource for businesses to be found worldwide. Potential customers use YouTube to find anything from educational videos and product reviews to throwing products in a blender and seeing how durable they are. As a result, adding SEO to YouTube videos has become just as important as adding SEO to your website.

To put it into perspective, the YouTube blog posted the following statistics in January:

Every second, one hour of video is uploaded to YouTube.
24 hours of video is uploaded every 24 seconds.
Nine months of video is uploaded every two hours.
A decade’s worth of video is uploaded every day.
Every 10 days, a century of video is uploaded.

Google now owns the top two search engines used in the US. The recent news has made me wonder: What will happen to YouTube’s search algorithm? We have already seen a number of updates to Google’s search algorithm to prevent spammy, irrelevant content. I believe YouTube search will have a similar fate in the future.

youtube seo

From what we know of YouTube’s algorithm, we can assume it takes the following into account: Title, Description, Tags, Number of Views, Rating and Trending. The last three items on that list appear to keep the search results honest. The channel and/or the owner of the videos control the other three factors in the algorithm manually. Over optimization in these areas could be docking your rankings on YouTube and Google.

Are you over optimizing your YouTube videos?

Here are a few tips to make sure that you’re not over optimizing your video:

Do not keyword stuff your title, description, and tags. Stuffing could result in lower rankings in YouTube and less visibility for your video.
Create natural and human-like titles and descriptions. It will increase your chances of being found. Think of when you use YouTube and want to search for something, how do you type it in? Not only does this work well for YouTube search, but it will increase your visibility on Google’s search results.