Chapter 15

Ten Key Steps to Improving YouTube Search Results

In This Chapter

  • Defining and optimizing video metadata
  • Improving channel search results
  • Avoiding misleading metadata

YouTube is about one thing: Getting people to watch your content. Before they watch it, though, they've got to find it. Simple, right? In theory, yes, but your challenge is to help viewers find your channel and your content. That's what search results are all about: Placing your content in front of the right viewers so that they can watch.

Unfortunately, YouTube doesn't share the secret sauce for getting found, but you can help improve the odds of your videos showing up in YouTube and Google Search as well as in Suggested Videos on the Watch page. To get that search engine to work for you, you need to optimize both your channel and your videos. It may come as a surprise to you, but YouTube cannot have a human watch all your videos to determine what topics they cover. To let YouTube understand what your videos are all about, then, you need to include metadata that describes the content for YouTube to index. (That's part of the optimization process.) In this chapter, we describe ten key steps for improving YouTube search results for your content.

Updating Video Metadata

Metadata are the words you use to describe your video — stuff like the video title, keyword tags, and video description. When uploading new content to your channel, YouTube walks you through the steps to add metadata. If you want to go ...

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