Marketing on Internet Road 

Although Search Engine Optimization is still mainly for web pages, as Google is presenting different media types in the search results first page, there is a lot of value in optimizing other media files such as videos on YouTube.

Once you have your videos on YouTube (and hopefully you have created your own channel where they are hosted), the same core principals of optimization should apply. The following list describes the 3 main elements for SEO’ing your YouTube videos to get them to appear on Google’s first page for your keywords of choice:

Use the name of the video like the title of the web page: Just as the optimization of a web page starts with a well optimized title, you should use your main keyword in the title of the video. Unlike with web pages’ titles, you may want to consider adding your website name after the key phrase as you would like to generate traffic from the video to your web site (so the structure should be something like: “Main Keyphrase – www.yourwebsite.com videos”).

Include your keyword in the description of the video: The description is where your second optimization step should take place. Unlike with web pages – where the description tag appears only on search results – the description of your video will appear both on the search results as well as on YouTube as well. So use your keywords and related keywords in the description of the video. Don’t forget to put the full URL of your website as well (starting with http://) as this will create a live link from the description text to your website.

Include your keyword in the video tags: although the keywords Meta tag has no effect anymore in web pages optimization, they very much do on YouTube. Those are used as the main search method for visitors on YouTube and will help a lot with showing up on relevant searches on Google itself.

Build links to your video: again, just like with web page, the key is to have links pointing in to your videos. The more links there are to a video on YouTube, the more authority ranking it gets and more visibility. Since visibility is what we all wish to gain, invest in link building to your videos as if you were doing link building to your website.


To sum it up, optimizing YouTube videos is very much like SEO for web pages, only it is much more focused around the keywords.