YouTube Ranking Strategies – Position Your Videos in the Top Search Results

It’s no secret that video can transform what would otherwise be a bland sales letter, web page, or blog into a dynamic and entertaining communication tool.

But have you ever considered that your online videos can actually drive traffic to your website rather than just acting as added value content?

By labeling your videos with a bottom third, carefully wording your video titles, and tweaking your descriptions a bit, YouTube and other video sharing sites can become traffic magnets that send targeted leads to your website who WANT to convert into clicks and/or sales.

The question is with so many people posting videos for the most competitive search terms, how can you get your video to rank high enough for anyone to notice your message?

The answer is MUCH easier than you think!

Why You Want Your Video
Ranked in YouTube

Well for one thing, you put time into shooting the video, producing it, and uploading it. If no one is watching it you have wasted your time.

If people search for a term and find your video it is much more likely that the person who did the search can be transformed into a targeted lead.

The Magic of the Bottom Third

When you produce your video, use your video editing software to place a URL or other message across the bottom 1/3 of your video.

You have a mere 2 seconds to capture a person’s attention, so make sure your bottom third starts right away and there is no boring title screen that preceeds the video. Get right to it and be enertaining in the first 2 seconds.

After the first 2 seconds, you have to recaptue the viewers attention again every ten seconds at a minimum. Try to keep your video under 2 minutes if possible, but never more than 3.

The longer you can keep your viewer’s eyes plastered to their computer screen, the longer they will be exposed to your bottom third message as well. Feel free to keep things interesting by changing the bottom third from time to time throughut the video, but the main concept or message should always remain the same.

How to Write Effective
Titles, Descriptions, and Tags

The easiest way to ensure people watch your video is to get it ranked for the terms you expect people to be searching for. If you are making a video about Netflix for example, you should have the word Netflix in your title, description, and your video tags.

You should try to make the first 2 words of your title be your primary keyword or words. For two videos that YouTube would normally rank identically, the title “Netflix is the Service I Love” will always beat “I Love the Netflix Sevice”.

If your goal is to drive traffic to your website from your video, make the first line of your description a URL.

For example, write your description like this:

http://www.myurl.com
I really love getting my videos ranked on YouTube because I get a ton of traffic from it. Watch to see why.

When people are watching your video on YouTube, they can click on the URL and have a look at your website as long as you use the http://www link structure.

Make sure that the ONE keyword that is most important to your video (the ONE word that people will be searching for) is the very first word in your Title and your tags. This is important and will help push your video up over the top of a similar video even if it has more views.

Make More Than One Video

When you are trying to get your point across with video, I recommend having one flagship video that will get all of the attention when you link to it from blogs, websites, etc.

Then while you are in your video editing software, make use of some of your extra clips to make different movies that deliver the same message.

Go online and find other videos that are within your niche that are getting views, and upload your video as a video response. Typically the owner of the video you are responding to will have the ability to accept or reject your video response.

Keep in mind that you can only use each mini-video as a response to one other video, so choose your target wisely. Your video response will then appear in a thumbnail just below the original video that is already popular. You are in effect piggybacking on someone else’s popularity – if they will let you.

One last word of advice… As popular as YouTube is, it is not the ONLY video sharing website on the net. Before you put all of your eggs in the YouTube basket, do a video search in the three major search engines to see what video websites are indexed frequently for your niche.

Upload your video to those sites at least. As a general rule, the more places you upload your video to, the more attention it will get. Attention means traffic, and if you are doing your job, you should be able to convert that traffic into sales.