What you Should Know about from Basics to Advance of YouTube SEO

Nisha Dalal
3 min readMar 29, 2020

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Video content is gaining more grounds in the entertainment industry; a large number of people now prefer videos than books or articles. News to education is all switching to e-learning via video lectures.

Videos allow for the more pictorial and animated representation of concepts, which are quite easily understandable.

However, making a good video does not ensure that one will get views, understanding its SEO (search engine optimization) is crucial if one wants to become successful in this field.

One of the major players in video content is YouTube. It is by far the largest collection of videos, and millions of hours of new content are added and played daily. Getting your content stand out on this platform is the main goal of this article.

Basics

Understanding Title, Description, Thumbnail, Playlist, and other common features -

Title

The title should be catchy and matches with the video content. Although YouTube allows 100 characters with spaces, only a small part of it is visible to viewers, especially mobile viewers who make up the majority of the viewership.

The title should contain only valuable information rearranged fashionably.

Channel Name

Make sure that your channel name is unique and does not sound like any other popular channels. It should not contain complex characters too much, and it should be simple to read for the targeted audience. It should be catchy and cool to the targeted viewer.

Channel name is an important factor, and it is, if not the first, an important thing that the viewer notices.

If you are running a business and your channel is exclusively for their promotion. Then ensure that the channel name is similar to the brand name. A growth hacking agency follows these practices quite often.

Description

The description contains keywords and reflects the content in the video. It mostly contains the credits (people who had a helping hand in making the video) links to products or trustworthy pages or additional information. It can also contain a short description of the video without exposing much crucial content of the video. The description is like a collection of important notes.

YouTube allows a maximum of 500 words, although you should not utilize all 500 unless necessary.

Tags and Criterion

They are used to add your video into certain categories, such as gaming, music, etc. They can also contain certain important contents of the video like character names etc. YouTube’s built-in tags/criteria are limited; however, you can add your tags as well.

They are there to help viewers search for a particular video without actually knowing the title or the channel name, even allowing YouTube’s algorithm to identify interested viewers and show you’re videos as suggestions.

Thumbnail

This is what a video will look like to a viewer before they play it; basically, it is a quick snapshot of the video displayed above the title; they represent a lot about the video content, even more than the title.

The picture should be enticing and must be relevant to your content. Many creators often edit the picture to make it look more attractive or exaggerated. Things often get out of hand when the thumbnail is too exaggerated, or the facts shown are not present in the video. This is known as click-bait, and there is a lot of debate going around this topic.

Make sure you keep the thumbnail honest and attractive.

Playlist

As the name suggests, it is a series of videos that are related to one another in some way.

The main aim is to keep viewers hooked if they like one of the videos, then YouTube quickly loads another one up from the playlist. This keeps viewers to watch the content that you provide rather than relying on the YouTube algorithm.

Translations

If you are releasing a specific product to multiple regions with different languages, your video needs to ensure that a maximum number of individuals are able to access and understand the video.

For this reason, YouTube has given us the option of translations. They allow the user to watch a particular video in subtitled format with subtitles in their comfortable language.

Apart from translations, one can also create different channels for different regions. For, eg. BBC-Hindi, Infographics- Tamil, etc.

Want to get done your YouTube SEO? Get in touch with a growth hacking agency.

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