- Tag your videos with keywords. Along with the title and the description, tags help the search engines identify the video's content. If you have relevant keywords, place them here.
- Encourage participation. For each video, there are options for "Broadcasting and Sharing." It's best to open commenting and embedding as much as possible, but remember that you will need to monitor your videos for spam and naughty comments. Also consider posting your videos as responses to other popular videos. This is a good way to piggyback on the success of someone else's video and divert some of those eyes to your own content.
- Watermark your videos. It's easy with most video editing software to place a small translucent logo in a corner of the video. It's your video after all, so take ownership.
- YouTube pulls thumbnails from the one quarter, half, and three quarters marks of every video. You can then choose which thumbnail is displayed. If it's not disruptive to do so, try to manipulate your video so that a compelling image appears at one of these points. Thumbnails have a large impact in a video's click-through.
- Take advantage of YouTube Insights. This analytics feature of YouTube is robust compared to other video sites and can provide information such as demographics and when people abandoned viewing specific videos. This data can help you improve future submissions.
Who did it great:
College Humor
College Humor has done a good job with its channel design. In the description box, it provides links to other social media profiles. The company also lists the people involved with the production of the videos and links to several awards it has received.
Coca-Cola
This video from Coke does an excellent job of using the description box, not to provide a verbatim transcript of the video (because there is no dialogue), but rather to describe exactly what is happening in the video.
Mistakes to avoid:
Most YouTube videos and channels are not properly optimized, even by big brands. Therefore, there is still tremendous opportunity to rank well on search results pages for many competitive keywords. Perhaps the biggest potential mistake is to close your videos off to sharing. It is vital to let users interact and embed your videos.
Also, resign yourself to the fact that no matter how good your videos are, people are going to say nasty things. As long as comments aren't profane, negative feedback is good. A mix of negative and positive comments makes the user experience more authentic.
Drew Hubbard is director of promotions and social media at The Search Agency.
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