By Scott Alden, search engine marketing manager for Ottawa University. Alden has more than 10 years of search engine optimization experience. www.ottawa.edu

YouTube is now the United States’ No. 2 utilized search engine behind Google. With the fact that Google also owns YouTube, Google’s overall dominance of search engine market share remains intact for the foreseeable future. What that means to you, is that YouTube is now no longer just a place for sports bloopers, cute pandas, laughing babies, and Star Wars Kid. No… YouTube is now one of the primary places that customers of your clients go to find information about products and services. This has caused a significant shift in the realm of video marketing over the last several years. No longer do you need to have multi-millions to have your commercial, products, testimonials, etc. seen by millions of viewers. Now, all it takes is the right video put on YouTube, and you can instantly have 10,000… 100,000… or maybe 1 million people watching your video and learning about your client.

So, let’s say you’ve done the hard part… you’ve created a fun, innovative video that shows your client in the best light. Now you’re ready to put the video out on YouTube! The question then becomes, “Now what?”

There are literally billions of videos living on YouTube today, with thousands added daily. So, how in the world do you make sure that your videos get seen at all without getting lost in the depths of YouTube’s video library? Anyone can upload a video to YouTube… it takes just minutes. But what will separate your video from others and actually cause it to be seen by your client’s customers is by knowing how YouTube’s search algorithm works. By understanding how and why YouTube shows which videos after a search, you’ll be able to maximize your clients’ video visibility and popularity.

YouTube’s search algorithm contains five main elements that determine how soon your videos come up when customers do a search. They are:

1. Title

2. Description

3. Tags

4. Number of Views

5. Rating

This is also the order of importance that most generally say you should pay attention to. (Be sure to keep video responses, comments, and ratings enabled on all your videos! Turning these off will put your video at a significant tactical disadvantage from your competitors, even if not all ratings and comments will be positive. You could always choose to monitor and approve the comments.) There are more than these 5 elements to the algorithm, but these are the primary ones that work within YouTube’s search itself. Some other elements include: playlists, flagging, embedding, comments, age of video, subscribers, and in bound links. But because the first five are the most important, and because #4 can’t be reached without the others, and you can’t really control how your customers rate your video, we’ll focus on the first three for this blog series beginning with Titles. The next post will be about Description.

Title

The Title that you name your video is perhaps the most important factor in making sure that the video gets found.

The title should be catchy, but it should also include relevant keywords like the name of the product, the name of the company, the name of the video perhaps, etc. For instance, in the title above, Sonic made sure their brand name was in the title. Had the title just been “You’re Crazy Commercial” then YouTube and customers would have had no idea it was a Sonic video. Be sure to use relevant keywords to the client’s industry as well. If your video, for example, promotes breast cancer awareness, then be sure that the words “breast cancer” are part of the title. Don’t be afraid to experiment. You can change the title any time you wish, so if you aren’t getting views, be sure to try changing the title around and see if that helps. Lastly, your title should be between 60 and 100 characters. Anything less than 60 and you’re not taking advantage of valuable real estate that YouTube allows, and 100 is the character limit for titles that they set.