YouTube.com is the second most popular search engine after Google. It’s used more than Yahoo and Bing.
Here are some guidelines for creating and optimizing your YouTube channel and your individual videos for Search:
How to Create a YouTube Channel
• Go to YouTube.com and sign in using your business Google login information. If you don’t already have a Google login, go to Google.com and set one up using practicename@gmail.com
• Go to “All My Channels”
• If you have a Google+ page (the listing that shows up in Google Maps), you can integrate your YouTube Channel with Google+ (this is a good idea). If you don’t have a Google+ page, click on “create a channel”
• Once you have a channel created, you can begin uploading videos and filling out your profile information. See the section below
How to Optimize Your YouTube Channel for Search
• Channel Description – Keyword optimize your channel description and make sure you describe what people can expect to find in your video content. Also include a link to your Website in your channel description. If you have the space, include links to your core social media pages (to cross-promote)
• Video Titles – Be sure to use keywords in your video titles.
• Video Descriptions – Start each description with your Website URL. Take full advantage of the space available to you and provide detailed, keyword optimized descriptions about each video. Remember, YouTube is a search engine. The content within your descriptions is how your rank in the search results.
• Tags – Tag your videos with relevant keywords
• Themes – Group your videos together in thematic sets (ideally created around keyword phrases). E.g. Fitting Techniques, Hearing Technology We Love, etc.
• Captions – Video-captioning is something that YouTube added to increase usability for hearing impaired viewers. Captioning is also something that can be used for SEO benefit. Make sure all of your videos have keyword-optimized captions and transcripts. This is particularly important given the industry you’re in!
• Geo-Tagging – Each video you upload can be geo-tagged. Geo-tag each video with the geographic region relevant to the video’s content. This is a good way to optimize your video for Local Search
• Social Media Integration – Just as you can feed your blog into Facebook and Twitter, you can do the same with your YouTube videos. Involver.com is just one application that you can use to do this. It is also advisable to host your videos on YouTube and then embed them on your website