Great thread. I know there is SEO in youtube but haven't looked at it this way. Come to think of it, the ability to optimize yoru video in search works hand in hand with SEO in Google. Imagine your top ranked on both. Massive traffic. Advice to self - study and work you way around youtube SEO.

It's just now that I see how high potential of return if I spend a lot of time with Youtube.

Kudos to google to actually own both of it. Damn.

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Your ranking depends on a handful of things. First, the title, then description and tags. It'll be dependent on the number of views but more importantly the percentage of the video that each of these people watch, the number of sites linking to it, people who have favorited it, meaning given it a thumbs up, shares, comments, the number of people who have embedded it on their site and subscriptions, particularly a subscription right after the video ends.

There's a handful of things you can do to get those. First, you want to make the file name of your uploaded video something with your best keywords in it. For example if we were doing a video on YT marketing, we might make the title YT-marketing-strategies.wmv. Google's search spiders are going to pick up on this.

Next you want to optimize your title to attract viewers and basically you're going to do the same thing you did with the file name but you only get 100 characters for this and the title one of if not the most important thing you do as far as your video goes. So you want to remember to use the keywords you want to rank for first in the title, meaning youtube marketing strategy and tutorial instead of strategy and tutorial for youtube marketing.

What I would recommending doing is a Google search for a word within your niche or whatever keyword you're trying to rank for and Check to see if there's any YT results. Look at your competitors' descriptions and tags and see what words they're using around. Then go to adwords.google.com and click tools at the top and go down to the Google Keyword Planner. See if they have a decent amount of monthly search volume but low competition - maybe 500 or more monthly searches. If so, you might consider using Google's recommendations as well as your competitors' keywords and tags

And actually right under the Keyword planner is something called display planner and you can use this to find even more keyword suggestions. This is Google's platform for finding keyword recommendations for YouTube videos and mobile advertisements so the things that you find there might actually be more relevant than the things you find in keyword planner.

You also want to pay extra attention to your description. Treat the description area the same way you would a blog post. They give you a maximum of 5,000 characters - which is like 900 words and Google tends to rank longer descriptions higher - so use it to your advantage. You just don't want to go crazy with the keywords or you're gonna be penalized for keyword stuffing.

You definitely want to include the word video somewhere in your description and tags and remember that YT videos tend to show up in the search results when someone does a search for tutorial, WT, demo, how to, music, reviews and of course anything followed by the word video. You'll want to use your web address preferably closer to the start than the end because a lot of people aren't going to finish reading all of it so you want to have something for them to click on relatively quickly. This can even be the first thing in the description. But remember when you put in your web address you want to include the http:// and not just yoursite.com. The http is gonna make it clickable.

If you happen to be trying to rank a video for a local business, try to mention your address, location, phone number and of course your web address and you can even include a section after that with a biography of your company and maybe some differentiators that might persuade consumers to choose you above the competition.

In addition to the title and description, you want to focus on the tags as well and I would suggest using Google keyword planner for this too. You get 120 characters worth of tags and you want to put your best keywords first just like you did with the title. You can include the name of the business in your tags as well so you can capture people looking for your videos by brand name. Plus if you put your brand name in there, YT will be more likely to display your other videos as the related suggestions you see when a video finishes, as long as you put your brand name as a tag in all of your videos.

A transcription will also help your YouTube ranking. That's often the difference between videos on the first page of the results and those on all the other pages.