SEO is an acronym that gets thrown around a lot, and it’s one of those that people seem to assume that everyone knows, and knows about. Let’s face it though, some of us only have a vague idea about SEO and the views it seems to promise. I wanted to give a quick overview on the core basics of SEO.
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. Basically, it’s the process of making your video as search-engine friendly as possible. If you really want to get into it, you can do some research into what people are searching for before you even film your video, but here I’m just going to go over some basics about how to optimize videos you have already created.
When you first upload your video to YouTube, you have to give it a title, description, and tags.
Pick a title that is descriptive and contains some searchable keywords. For instance, if you are one of the many YouTubers that is uploading a video of a cat, you would want to title your video something like “Cute Cat Playing with Yarn” or “Cat Getting Eaten by Dog,” depending on the content. Make sure that your spelling is correct! You may think it’s cute or cool to spell plurals with a z at the end, or replace some letters, but people don’t search for those invented spellings; they search for the real spellings.
For the description, write one, and write a long one! You want to have the first couple sentences be very descriptive and use keywords, because that is what people scan when they pull up your video on a search. After that though, keep writing. The longer the description, the more data there is to search. Remember though, that if you use too many keywords in an artificial sounding say, search engines recognize that you’re trying to manipulate the system and your video can get dropped to the bottom of the pile.
Tags are the part that a lot of people get confused about. You want to put in your keywords, variations of them, and even some common misspellings. So for my cat video, I would use tags like “cute, adorable, cat, cats, catz, kat, kats, katz, kitty, kitties, yarn, stuck, tangle, tangled” just to begin with. I would also add in the medium I used to film and edit it, so “Canon, 4ti, canon 4ti, dslr, macbook, mac, macbook pro, apple, adobe, adobe suite, premiere, adobe premiere.”
One good resource for this is the YouTube Keyword Tool. This tool allows you to set your country and language, input a keyword, and then it gives you a list of related keywords and how often they’re searched.
After the tags, you get to select the thumbnail for the video. Remember to pick one that represents the video and will look attractive or stand out in a search next to other video thumbnails.
Don’t forget to go to your advanced settings and list the video location and recording date.
Remember, the most important things to do are use correct spelling, find some keywords, and write lots of searchable content.
Next time, we’ll get a little more into SEO, and some ways to make your video even more searchable.
