I haven’t been marketing heavily on YouTube, but I have learned some valuable lessons when it comes to making your video index well in the YouTube search engine through keywords, related videos, titles and descriptions… as well as groups, bots, subscribers and friends.
Here are some of my personal experiences with the above elements of the YouTube battlefield;
YouTube Video Titles
Titles on the web, serve as a headline for linking in search engines and message boards. Likewise, video title in YouTube are used as the link for the video. The text being linked is referred to as “anchor text”. One of the most powerful SEO tactics is to include your keywords in the link.
Here is an example of poor anchor text: To view the Ill Scarlet EPK Video, click here
Here is an example of good anchor text: View the Ill Scarlet EPK Video
The latter, will yield better rankings in search engines such as Google because it defines the destination url… a search engine or human would not know what “click here” is pointing to without the rest of the sentence. That being said, using keywords in your video title will not only improve your rankings in the YouTube search engine, but help other search engines like Yahoo & Google list your video for those keywords.
YouTube Video Keywords
Every video must be accompanied by targeted keywords, i.e. relevant search terms to your video. I have found that the most effective way of getting your video related to other videos is to match up keywords. When you preview a video, you’ll see a number of additional videos on the right side, i.e. more from ________, related videos, and promoted videos. To get your video listed in “related videos”, your best tactic is to copy the selected keywords for the video you are targeting including the order in which they appear.
For example, if I’ve covered an artist live, for the same song that they have an official music video for, I would do the following;
YouTube Video Response
Another quirky mooch tactic is to post a video response to the official music video by attaching the live music video to it. This is done in the comments area of each video. It’s a better way of plugin in your own YouTube channel as text links in comments tend to be flagged as spam or advertising. Attaching your video, is more acceptable if it is relevant to the video page, such as a live video of the same song. This is a great way of keeping your name at the top of their comments because there are very few videos responses in comparison to text comments which get pushed further and further down the list.
YouTube Video Description
Obviously a video description should be an accurate representation of the footage in the video with compelling text to engage the audience enough that they click the play button. However, unlike other video hosts such as MySpace TV, YouTube will let you insert urls in the video description linking back to your official site or anything else for that matter. Our approach is to post a teaser of the full video on YouTube with a link back to the full video off the official site in the description. The one setback to creating links in the video description, is that you do not have control over the anchor text. Rather, YouTube will create the link for you provided that you add “http://” in the front of the url, which is better than no link at all.
YouTube Groups
This has proven to be a great means of syndicating videos across other blogs. In the YouTube community section, are thousands of video groups some of which are very niche and perhaps right up your alley. We post our hip hop content to hip hop groups, and group members discuss the video as well as post the video to their own website. This is the best area for viral marketing in YouTube. It’s one thing to post it to your own channel and bring traffic in, versus posting it someplace that already has the specific traffic you are looking for.
YouTube Bots
Some people feel that bots used to automate processes on such platforms as Facebook, YouTube, and MySpace are unethical. Personally, and I think a lot of people will agree… automation is not unethical, spamming is unethical. So what’s spamming? I would say that spamming would be poorly targeted canvasing, whereby I generate a list of demographics for people with the following profile; 18 to 25 in Toronto. There is no assurance that that pool of individuals will have any real interest in what you are sharing. However, if I gathered a list of individuals who have positive comments to an artist I have covered, I’m sure they would support and appreciate being invited to a live music video of the artist they love.
There are plenty of applications out on the web that you can purchase to help speed things up… who has time to send 400 messages out to qualified prospects? Is it not to everyone’s benefit to use these applications? Would it not get the word out faster and further?
Google “youtube bot” or check out TellyAdder for more information.