YouTube SEO Tips: How to Rank Videos on YouTube

Need to know how to rank videos on YouTube!? This blog post has everything you need to get cracking and ultimately gain better video rankings for your YouTube channel.

YouTube SEO optimisation is crucial and the techniques here will help increase traffic and views for your videos, thereby building a bigger audience. To ensure that your videos are optimised for SEO, you will need to focus on your titles, descriptions and tags. Below are a few Youtube optimisation tips for 2018 and beyond!

1. Titles

For YouTube title optimisation, you need to consider what your video is based on, making it suitable and relevant and also ensuring it attracts users.

The title will be the first thing users will see, which shows how imperative it is to get this aspect right. For instance, if you had a video that is based on a video game campaign, the title should look something like this:

“Insert Game Title” | Gameplay Walkthrough Part #1 – “Insert Mission Name”

This shows the user that your video is about a particular game, and it’s also a walkthrough of the campaign, what episode it is and the name of the mission they are going to watch. Whereas if you had a title that reads:

“Insert Game Title” – Part #1

This mentions the game title, but nothing else. It’s far too broad and your video will never rank for just the game name.

Including more information and a title unique to your video is better and will get users clicking on the video. Here’s a summary of what makes a great title:

1. Get the main information across
2. Include the main keywords
3. Mention the title at the beginning of your video
4. Make it suitable and relevant

2. Descriptions

The second step is implementing a big and lengthy description. Ensure that you fit in the necessary keywords, but also provide a decent amount of information on what the video is about.

You will also want to leave links to previous videos and links to your social media. If people click through to another video, they’ll get more interested in your channel and will be more than likely subscribe to your channel. Here are five tips for a good description:

1. Ensure that it’s lengthy and relevant
2. Include the video title in the description
3. Add links to social media
4. Include links to previous videos
5. Ask for a like and subscribe

3. Tags

Tags are crucial for YouTube SEO. In the tag section, you’ll want to add keywords relevant to your video. The first tags you put in should be keywords mentioned in your title. For example, ‘Video Rankings’, ‘YouTube SEO’, ‘SEO’, ‘Rankings’, ‘Video Views’ and so on.

Using as many tags as possible are what helps more people reach your videos. Although it’s good to have a lot of tags, it’s also vital to make them suitable and relevant to your video, but you can work around that. For example, my video is on YouTube SEO optimisation, so I could use ‘digital marketing’ as a keyword in the tags.

Here are five tips to get the best tags for your video:

1. Use the maximum amount of tags
2. Don’t waste tags as they are important
3. Include the video title in the tags
4. Ensure that it’s relevant to the video
5. Include related subjects in the tags

According to an infographic by One Productions, more than 100 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute, while the website processes more than 3 billion searches per month. Using these YouTube SEO tips for your video will help push views, traffic and rankings.

Getting videos optimised for SEO and pushing more and more content out with these techniques is a great way to build your audience. The more you do this, the better and easier that ranking on YouTube will become.

Need more Youtube SEO tips or help with SEO in general? Contact our specialists below.