Ranking Your Videos In Youtube: Step By Step Guide

So I've decided to put together a brief but comprehensive guide to YouTube Marketing for the readers of this forum. I get asked how to rank videos in YouTube several times a day by my clients (I'm a local SEO consultant and an online backlinks broker), and I find myself amazed at how misunderstood certain elements are. Ranking Videos is not Rocket Science. Many times getting a video up the SERPS is much easier than ranking a site or even a Web 2.0 property.

Over optimization penalties do not come into effect. Backlinking penalties don't matter, and hey videos are cheap to either make yourself, or outsource for a few bucks, yet they can bring amazing amounts of highly targeted traffic to your site/product/cpa or just for the Ad revenues. And you have two separate (though obviously related) platforms where you can get your traffic; The SERPs and YouTube Search.

So here's the Deal

Step by Step:

1. For every product/niche you are targeting you want to create a separate YouTube channel. So if you're targeting "Lose Weight in 30 Days", get create a channel called "Lose Weight in 30 Days" or something very close "Lose Weight in 30 Days Fast" "Lose Weight in 30 Days Guaranteed". This will be a major SEO boost to your videos. More importantly this channel will allow you to successfully market all related keywords: "Lose weigh in 30 Days Review" "Best Lose Weight in 30 Days Product" "Learn How to Lose Weight in 30 Days", etc.

2. Your Title Means Everything. Your title is the single most important onPage factor for your video. Title your video exactly the keyword you are targeting. "Lose Weight in 30 Days" is your title. Don't put anything else in there. If you're going after "Lose Weight in 30 Days Review"
that's your title.

*** A little side note here, before you start going after "Make Money Online" check out the videos first. If they have 20,000+ views and have been around for a while, and are on a popular channel with loads of subscribers... do yourself a favor and look for something else

3. Description. 2nd most important onPage factor. Place your keyword first, then your url. i.e. Lose Weight in 30 Days: http://www.mysite.com and then put a nice keyword loaded description. YES you can keyword stuff here. Mention you keyword at least 3 times, use LSI permutations and all that other fun stuff.

4. Tags 3rd most important onPage factor. Use up all the tags you can. Keyword stuff like crazy, but also use the recommended tags that YouTube provides (their so nice to us). If you’re not using up all the tags, you are leaving out potential search streams for your video, and depriving it of full SEO merit. YouTube allows a maximum of 30 characters for any single tag, and a maximum of 500 characters for all combined tags. So use them up.


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Alright, your Video is as optimized as it's ever going to be. Time for the offPage factors.

1. Views. You need more views than your competing videos. It's really that simple. If you don't have more views, chances of you overtaking a video especially if its been around a bit longer and is also onPage optimized are slim. You can purchase views directly, although you really need to look for something called "slow views", and not the bot style mobile views that you could do 10,000 in 3 hours (no joke) as these are really being heavily discounted by YouTube now.

Better yet, get signed up for some social exchanges like AddmeFast, YouLikeHits, Vagex, and leave your browser open 24/7 collecting credits for YouTube Views. If you have an old PC laying around gathering dust, now's the perfect time to hook it up, and let it become a tokens collector on these sites. In a few days running 24/7 you can have enough credits for 20,000 views. Or buy them, its up to you, but you need the views.

2. Use the exact same services to get you videos tons of "likes" comments, and subscribes to your video channel. You would never just have views without these other metrics coming into play, so make everything look as natural as possible.

3. This is the one that most don't know about, and this will make or break your whole campaign. Video embeds. The code from the YouTube Video used on other sites. This is huge. The references actually show up under the video (sometimes). Embed everywhere you can. Use the video on your Blog, paste it on your Fanpage, paste it on your personal Facebook wall, Web 2.0 properties you control (Think Squidoo, Multiply, Weebly, etc.) and anywhere else you can.

Here's my personal list of sites accepting YouTube Embed Code Directly for Sharing:

Flixya.com
SBNation.com
Indyarocks.com
Twitvid.com
Wonderhowto.com
Spike.com
Break.com
Myvidster.com
Videosift.com
Buzzfeed.com

The great think about these sites, is you can just paste you YouTube code right in. They are high PR, high Traffic sites, so if you have an interesting video you will get views and possibly conversions. They will boost both your internal Youtube Rankings, and google SERPs

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And that really is YouTube marketing in a nutshell. If you're also after google SERP placement then you need to have these 3 elements dialed in, as well as backlinking. YouTube videos are much much more resilient than say a website, or even Web 2.0 property when it comes to what you can get away with as far as blasting it. Social Bookmarks, Wikis, and some nice Forum Profiles work really well here, and just some Fiverr gigs will do the trick.

A world of warning Scrapebox AA (auto-approve) comment blasts are a Big NO NO now. I've tested this vigorously, and they just drop even Facebook pages now. I wouldn't even use them to index my backlinks now, and so am suggesting you stay away from them for YouTube videos also. However a few niche related manually placed comments would be a great addition.

A Few Other Top Tips:

- give your channel some authority in your niche. If your target videos are on weight loss, be sure to include a few on "healthy living" "dieting tips" "keeping fit", etc. Not only will this give you channel and all its videos a nice boost in authority which will translate to better rankings, you now also have a very nice sales funnel in place, so that even if a viewer wasn't particularly captivated by the first video of your they saw, they might well like the looks of one of your other videos which are auto suggested by YouTube.

- Youtube now gives you the option to feature other channels on your channel. Make use of this to again gain higher authority, and create a much more rewarding user experience (to which they will want to come back). Obviously don't feature channels that are in direct competition to yours, but something related to your niche would work very well.

Hopefully this has been an informative guide to you guys. Remember, you won’t get very far unless you take action. So go ahead and put these techniques into use. Come back and let us know how it worked out for you.

 

Actually quite good guide, I see that you have read many official statements from YouTube blog. Definitely content and longer plays get higher rankings, but for sure titles and tags are also very important.

 

check this out, videomarketer.us ... i 100% follow the instructions given and i was able to rank the videos in my YT channel in less than 48 hrs.. i can assure you that..

 

Glad you found this useful. Yes this guide definitely adherers to current YouTube best practice guidelines. Well maybe not the paid views bit.... but your not going to get very far without those

 

Nice quide . It will help me a lot.

 

It's a nice guide but I will just add to it. One needs to name their video file, the keyword they are targeting before uploading it to YouTube. Somewhere in the description put your channel link and the video link too.

 

100% agreed on titling the actual file your main keyword.... left that part out, thanks for noticing it. Adding a link to your video and your channel in the description seems redundant and distracting however, you should only use the url you are promoting as I mention in Step 2, directly after your main keyword. That's your call to action! All other links would reduce your CTR to your main target.

 

Nice guide, all-in-one tips, thanks

 

Glad you found this guide useful

 

Glad to help. Thanks mate.

 

This was an awesome post thank you oh and i'd like to contribute another one cinemahaven.com you can submit via the url and since they use the youtube api it'll count towards your views.

 

Wow. This is a really good guide. I'm bookmarking this for sure. Very well thought out.

 

Question, Can i create two or more channels from my one account (if so how do i do that) or do i need to create another account in order to have another channel?

 

As far as I know, it's one channel per account, but you can use the same phone number to verify 5 different accounts. It's kind of a pain, but also lets you keep your different channels organized by account...

 

Thank you for the contribution. I didn't have that site on my list. Bookmarked for future marketing. Cheers

 

Thanks, this was a good thread and great information. Every bit helps.

 

It's really great guide for YT marketing. Dose it necessary to buy views of use exchange programs to increase views of video to get good ranking.

 

thank you, it's very helpful

 

Nope you need a different email address.


Thanks for this guide OP!

 

Hi there. Glad you found this helpful. Unfortunately, unless your video is part of some hot trend, or just miraculously goes viral on its own, purchasing or exchanging views is absolutely critical to any chance at ranking your video. Without the views, YouTube and Google search will simply think that it is irrelevant, and not rank you highly enough.

Of course I should have mentioned there are also "link bait" tactics, whereby you can comment, or use your video as a reply to other very popular videos and try to naturally draw views that way. But its hard to get a huge amount of views like that.