I’m going to be talking to you about how to do SEO for YouTube a number two search engine and how to optimize your articles for higher rankings in that search engine. So Who am? I am stuff and Spencer, I’m the co-author of the art of SEO, co-author of social commerce and author of Google power search all published by o’reilly. I founded an SEO agency in the 90s called net concepts.
I sold it to covario in 2010. I invented an SEO technology platform called gravity stream and I have an SEO training and coaching program at science of SEO com. So that’s me, these are my books. If you don’t really care about that. You care about getting the result for yourselves and want me to share with you a little brief case study example of how you can achieve this. Even if you’re a kid my daughter and she started doing SEO and blogging when she was 14.
You can see in the screenshot here. She’s got some YouTube articles where she’s doing some screencast, showing some game, cheats and so forth for a neopets, calm website and how to earn extra lives or an extra points, and things like that, so she monetized the site using google adsense and every time people clicked On the google ads that were prominently displayed on her site, she would get paid. So if a kid can do it, so can you, but here is a one of the easiest tools of all to do.
Seo with for youtube is simply just start doing some searches or typing in some keystrokes into the youtube search engine and the search box. You’ll see search suggestions based on the keystrokes that you’ve already typed. So these are roughly an order of popularity that gives you some good brainstorming. You can also use a tool called suble, which I covered in another segment about keyword, brainstorming.
So if you go to sue volcom – and you start typing in some different keywords and see what the search suggestions are not just from youtube, but also Google and Bing and Yahoo and answers com and so forth – that’s pretty cool. You can also use google trends, but not in the way that you might be accustomed to. Let me show you specifically what I mean. So if I go to google.Com / trends and then I put in whatever like a neopets – and I want to see how that performs as a keyword in youtube well, I have to change from web search up here on the top to youtube search.
Most people don’t even know that that even exists. That option allows me to get data back on what keywords are popular in the youtube search results? Is that awesome or what so be sure to use google trends and incorporate that into your YouTube SEO a tool set? All right, so, let’s now talk about what to create in terms of article content, because if you create something, that’s not very worthy of being readed or or shared or liked, or anything like that, then it’s just going to fall flat.
It’s not going to go viral! It’s not going to get a lot of views, it’s not going to rank well because it’s just not remarkable and when I say remarkable I mean stuff codons definition of remarkable. It’s worth remark about it’s a purple cow, so you need to create something that is worth remarking about and the format of it doesn’t matter whether it’s a screen cast recording or it’s a article of you.
You know talking that sort of article or it’s a montage of different images or it’s an audio podcast with some still images added to it. So it is now in article forms and taking your audio podcast and you’ve uploaded it to YouTube could be any number of different things. But you know this unique article based content has to again be worthy of somebody wanting to share it, a link to it blog about it, etc.
So these are some different kinds of articles. This one is a explainer article. That’s one of those white board type of articles. Here’s an explainer article, that’s done as an animation. This one is a next. I guess you could call it an explainer article, but it’s just more of a viral article, really good Dollar Shave Club on the map. This thing went crazy, viral millions and millions of views. This is another type of whiteboard explainer article, but this one is, you know with the guy talking and explaining and having that.
Actually, this is not a white board as a flip chart. Here’s another whiteboard article. This is from one of my co-authors on the art of SEO, and this is a podcast, but one where they’ve taken the article of the podcasters speaking instead of using still images, they took article as well, and this is a fun science article. This is the past client of mine, steve Spangler, been on the ellen, show a bunch of times and everything doing.
I was crazy. Amazing science experiments and he has several different youtube blogs that do really well Spangler effect is one of them is also six science says another one and steve Spangler Science pocket or blog. This is a screencast which is just a screen recording and you can explain different software programs or you can go through PowerPoint decks like what I’m doing here. You can just use screen recording software, such as ScreenFlow for the mac or Camtasia for PC or Mac to record the screen, and your audio as the overlay here is a really popular example of a kind of an explainer article, but done with animation using xtranormal, where You pick the avatars and you give it the script and then the avatars speak the lines that you’ve given it.
This is a micro sites where it was live, article of a intern college intern who worked all summer long at the prophetic and melds headquarters. You know from Mentos the makers of mentos. He worked there just sitting in front of a webcam and then chatting with people who came to the mentos internal website as well as you can give them work to do I go. He can you fill out the spreadsheet for me and stuff, because what else is he going to do? Is just sit in front a computer all day in front of the webcam, so that was a fun viral live article stream websites that did really well in social media and got lots of links so just think outside the box.
Basically and then once you have this really compelling link worthy article content and you’re going to want to leverage power users to get that noticed by a larger audience and then potentially to spill over and to like go viral. Basically, and so you go get that that snowball effect happening or just keep growing, bigger and bigger and bigger, and then just kind of ticks off with a life of its own.
So you could create something that if it leverages an existing name or you create a new meme meme is a copy me instruction, backed up by threats and or promises. It’s a great definition from that’s the best definition. I’ve ever heard it’s from an expert, and professor and viral means you want to see your link worthy articles from a power user account. So you want to have power user in your back pocket that you can tap into somebody who has a big fan base.
So when they submit it, it’s going to get viewed by a number of people and then that snowball effect happens. You can also reach out to influencers and we’ll get to that little bit, reach out to influencers and offer that compelling content in a way that makes them want to share it. But it’s a lot easier, just to have a power user in your back pocket that you can just call in a favor with or or pay them some money and they seed your remarkable content.
Ok, so article content building, it’s got to be compelling, as I’ve said. You’ve got to hopefully reinforce the message of your brand around and pick the right keywords that you want to target use a watermark so that if people steal your article, your brand is still going to there’s still going to be brand impressions for you, even if they Ripped off your article and are using it elsewhere include links and references to your site like in the article description and YouTube description so forth, we’ll get to that in a minute.
So the title should be keyword rich and compelling. Should convince the user, the the YouTube user to click, to read your article. It’s one of the most compelling things. The only thing more compelling in terms of driving the clip from the youtube search results is the thumbnail. It’s important to be a concise but also keyword, rich, it’s kind of a balancing act, keep it to the 62 character or less limit and short and punchy and compelling is the key here.
The description, here’s an opportunity for you to further add more relevant keywords into the mix and to differentiate yourself from competitors and provide a unique son proposition. A really great call to action, put a link to your site high in the description. So they don’t have to click on the show more link to a button to see your your link, but it’s maybe the first line of the description tags are important as well.
So tags would be keywords that are going to and get this magic happening in the back, and you don’t see what these tags are. As a youtube user, you’d have to use you have to view source and give you the HTML source to see what those tags are in our competitors article but anyways, it’s it is used in the ranking, Doug rhythm at need you to again you want to do Your keyword, research before you identify the tags that you want to incorporate, don’t use throwaway words like and and 2 comma separate these tags and put them in order of importance to you.
So the most important most popular keywords should be the first ones in the list of tags yep. So let’s talk now about annotations. Annotations are a great way to drive, clicks and different user actions. If viewer is reading the article – and you really want them to subscribe, your blog to like the article to visit your website to whatever right you want to make those calls to action in the side of a an annotation, and these annotations can be added later.
After the article has been published and everything a lot of these things can be changed and, added to after the article has been published on YouTube, you can go back and change the title: the description, the thumbnail, the annotations and so forth. Let’s yeah: let’s ask people over location, we’ll talk now about thumbnails, because this is so so critical. This is the screenshot over. On the right hand, side comes from the blog of vat19.
Com vat19.Com you tube. They have over 440 million views across all of their YouTube articles and it’s amazing. They have some articles that have tens of millions of views, so pretty amazing and they’re all product articles. They saw all sorts of crazy stuff like 26 pound me bears, and things like that, so you can see from the screenshot that their thumbnails are compelling. They make you want to click and not just some talking head.
The worst kind of thumbnail is one: where just looks super boring. You can upload your own custom thumbnail. You just have to have a you. Just left a bit a verified youtube account, so just specify a mobile phone number. It will YouTube, will send you a text message with the verification code. Then you use that in the verification you can just type in that code into the YouTube site boom. Now your verified user and you can upload custom thumbnails.
It doesn’t even have to be a frame from the article it could be completely. Custom announced all sorts of graphics on to it, etc. All right now formats, don’t matter, could be a avi or WMV or whatever lanes of the article try to keep it short of. Like definitely less than 10 minutes, I’ve say even less than five minutes make it concise and punchy. The usability expert, Steve Krug, who wrote don’t make me think, says this write copy for your site and cut it in half and cut it in half again.
Do same thing for your your article transcripts or your article scripts, just to make it punchy short and sweet and value high value. Add, and also bear in mind as far as metrics are concerned for YouTube, is paying much more attention not to the number of views for your article, but to the percentage of your article that users read that’s a key key metric transcripts. So if you override YouTube’s auto-generated transcript with your own you’re, going to have a much higher quality transcript, because if you look at the caption of the caption text or transcript text that is auto generated by YouTube, it’s full of errors, it’s a joke! So definitely you want to upload your own version.
That’s all corrected even better. If you can also upload foreign language translations of your transcript, then people can read the version of your article in their foreign language. The audio is still the same, but it now has closed. It has subtitles, so that’s pretty awesome and then now you’re, showing up in foreign language search queries to on YouTube. You can use services to pit you pay a service to create a transcript for you, like dotsub or automatic sync, and never turn off the ability for users to like and dislike your article.
It’s a crucial part of user engagement and likes, or it’s a crucial metric that YouTube looks at right. So when you build links to your article on YouTube, also build links to a web version, that’s like embedded on your website or a microsite, and, for example, Blendtec has all these viral articles of the founder tom dixon blending, ipods, iphones action figures rake handles the golf Clubs, etc, etc.
In his blenders, that’s pretty fun to read, but if he only got links just to the YouTube articles, that would not help his SEO as much as if he also got links to his his own website and what they did was to created. A separate microsite called. Will it blend calm because Blendtec calm is all about e-commerce buying their their product, whereas will it blend? Calm is all about those viral articles.
If I’m a journalist writing about those viral articles, I’d want to link to the microsite as well as link to the YouTube blog. So that’s a great way to get some additional SEO benefit by having really popular articles. You could also consider syndicating your article onto other popular article sharing sites, like blip TV and metacafe, and so forth. You could use a tool like drop load to do that in a more automated fashion.
So you don’t have to go to each site individually. You can upload it once and then use drop load to upload it to all the different places that you specify reference. Your URL of your YouTube article and your RSS and M RSS feeds. Mrs S is multimedia or media, really simple, syndication feed for folks who are grabbing podcasts and so forth, automatically on to their into their itunes and so forth. Let’s see so those are some tips for article link building and then anchor text is going to be important when people use words like click here or check this out or read.
This, then, that’s not as helpful as, if they’re, using keyword, rich phrases, because google, the search engines in general, associate the anchor text of the underlying words in the link with the page that’s being linked to. So, of course we want diversity. We don’t want it to look overly engineered with the same keyword, rich phrase appearing all over the place. That looks not legit, but we want diversity and keyword, rich anchor text to a some degree to a limited degree.
We want to go over the top and then also just measure your success using YouTube analytics using Voot and boot looks like this. This is giving you really great insight into not just number of views, but other YouTube engagement, metrics like likes and dislikes favoriting comments. Article replies etc and it tracks your youtube search rankings too. I don’t know of any other tool that tracks your youtube search.
Rankings probably potentially may be tracking. Your search rankings in Google and Yahoo and Bing may be using to like Authority, labs or Moz calm, but what about your youtube search rankings? It’s the number two search engine. So that’s where food comes in via OT net and then turn off your article statistics in your youtube articles, because you don’t want your comment to be checking you out and looking at things like the trend over time and views and time readed and subscriptions and so Forth, that’s for your eyes only! It should be so turn that off it’s just a simple little checkbox to disable that so here’s where you do it, you just tick the box that says one tick, the box that says make these stats publicly available.
So that was a lot of cool stuff in a very short little article. So I hope this was helpful to you be sure to follow me on twitter at spencer and email, my assistant, if you would like some really cool freebies, including an extended edition version of the slide deck, I can hopefully hook you up with a beta invite to Boot, I know the folks there they’re good people. I have a white paper on SEO myths.
I have a how-to article on getting higher rankings in the youtube search engine and also can send you the link building chapter of my book, the art of SEO. So all those awesome freebies, if you just email admin at Stefan Spencer, calm, that’s the email address of my assistant. You have any questions for me specifically feel free to email me at Stefan at Stefan Spencer, calm, thanks very much for listening.
This stuff and Spencer. Have a great day,
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