YouTube SEO – How to Optimize Your YouTube Video?

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Search Engine Optimization is the ever-green solution for promoting and ranking a website. Optimizing your website to gain traffic is necessary. But nowadays, SEO factors apply to media posts covering famous platforms like YouTube.

YouTube is the second most famous search engine after its parent company Google. Even if you search for a solution or guideline on Google, the results may show in the form of YouTube videos.

But the YouTube optimization words are slightly different from Google search engine optimization. So, what is YouTube SEO?

youtube seo guide

What is YouTube SEO?

YouTube SEO is crafting the video’s text in the form of transcripts, captions, and subtitles, which can directly impact the user experience and improve video ranking on YouTube and Google.

In this article, I will guide you on optimizing your YouTube video with an effective SEO strategy. This guide would provide various tips to help you build a proper YouTube SEO strategy.

Tips to Optimize Your YouTube Video

YouTube optimization includes a channel, playlists, video titles, meta descriptions, and videos. The following tips will help you optimize videos on YouTube.

Find the Right Keywords

YouTube is indeed a platform that contains content in the form of digital media. But keywords still hold significant importance for YouTube ranking factors. These keywords can be featured in video titles, transcripts, and captions generated against the spoken audio.

Keywords should have the following correspondence. They have to be relevant to the content being displayed in your video. Secondly, they should match the terms searched by the targeted audience on YouTube.

youtube tags

For finding the relevant keywords, you can take assistance from tools like TubeBuddy. The TubeBuddy tool provides you with complete information on keyword volume, difficulty, and much more. To know about this YouTube SEO Tool read my detailed TubeBuddy review now.

Include Captions

The captions are not just a stream of subtitles playing under your video content. It provides descriptive information and gets recognized by the Google search engine.

For example, if you search for some guidelines or how to fix content on Google. The search result may appear in the form video, with the quoted captions as the solution for the user’s query.

Therefore, it is recommended to feature the relevant long-tail and short-tail keywords in your YouTube captions to achieve a better optimization rate.

YouTube is capable of auto-generating captions. But they are unreliable as the algorithm may misunderstand some words due to the dialect or accent. Therefore, manually adding captions through the SRT file for the YouTube videos is recommended.

Add Transcript in Video Descriptions

Video description words similar to the concept of meta descriptions. The description field of YouTube fits 5000 characters, sufficient to include a transcript. However, it displays the first 150 characters, depending on the device.

If you think the transcript is not fit enough for the description and you need to stuff more information, then go for call-to-action. You can provide a hyperlink with a word or phrase that contains all the information about your content.

If you can’t find the right console to keep tabs on description and transcript length, try an online EditPad for quick and easy access to an editor. An online text editor is reliable due to the accessibility and usability of auto-save options.

The transcripts and description of the video should contain the relevant keywords. The search engine crawlers are not only focused on the title, but the description elaborates the actual relevancy of the content.

Can We Connect on YouTube?

Provide Subtitles in Multiple Languages

This tip benefits those who provide promotional and informational content on YouTube. Web admins should understand that giant platforms like Google and YouTube are not limited to a specific region or language.

Therefore, your content should cover at least some significant languages spoken around the globe. It doesn’t mean you have to record the audio in different languages. You can translate and upload captions in other languages for better understanding.

This strategy can draw much organic traffic from various regions to your content. The captions/subtitles have a great chance of being displayed as featured snippet answers in the Google search engine. Therefore, adding captions can help you to achieve better rankings.

Write Optimized Meta Titles and Tags

Similar to the concept of YouTube video description writing, you must feature relevant keywords in your meta titles and tags to get recognized by the YouTube search algorithms.

Once you have found the right primary keyword, feature it in the right places. Avoid keyword stuffing as search engines consider it a negative aspect of optimization. Therefore, you have to feature the keywords naturally as the aim is to write for the audience and search engines.

A meta title fits 100 characters, displaying 70 characters to state the essential information. Therefore, the primary keyword for your video should be covered in the first 70 characters of the meta title.

optimize youtube video meta titles

Meta tags fit approximately 500 characters, and it’s recommended to stay within this limit. You can use double quotes to surround specific phrases representing long-tail keyword phrases.

Conclusion

In this guide on optimizing YouTube videos, I have presented some easy solutions to build an effective content marketing strategy. These tips are recommended for those who have recently stepped into digital media.

The video itself is just multimedia content. But everything text related to that video, including titles, descriptions, captions, and tags, becomes the ranking factor.

The search engine crawlers are focused on the mentioned areas to find the relevant information that can assist in achieving higher rankings.

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About Sudesh Roul

Sudesh RoulHi there, I'm Sudesh Roul, a video creator, and certified marketer from Kolkata, India. Here I share photo animation, video creation and marketing tips, YouTube tutorials, online service and software reviews to guide you in making an informed purchase and growing online. You can consider reading my blog regularly to scale your photo and video creation journey and their marketing. Connect with me on YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.