Ranking a video on YouTube is similar to ranking a site on Google: it’s a mixture of making sure your video (page) is optimised for your keyword phrase and a number of other factors, some of which are part of YouTube’s proprietory algorithm.

But – as you’d probably expect from a company owned by Google – the basics are the same as ranking a web page.

Start with your title

On a regular web page, it’s the page title.

On YouTube it’s the video title, which has a hyphen and the word YouTube added to it by YouTube.

You need to make sure that this matches a phrase people are searching for.

Whilst you can use the suggestions that come up as you type in YouTube to do this, you can also use the suggestions that come up in Google. Most of the time these will be similar and (so long as you’ve turned off instant suggestions) there usually are more to choose from in Google.

Choose a phrase that has quite a few words as whilst there’s less traffic at this level there’s also less competition and – more importantly – people are often in buying mode for this kind of phrase.

Put your chosen phrase in the video as a title

YouTube picks 3 potential thumbnails and, if your account has enough privileges, you can upload a custom thumbnail if necessary.

Personally I tend to put the title as the “slide” for the first third or so of the video, sometimes all of it, and that usually allows me to select it.

Most videos have a picture as a thumbnail and most video marketers don’t take the chance to optimise the image, so you’re left guessing as to what the video is about.

Sure, the image will show up as a thumbnail in YouTube and – if it decides to rank you – in Google as well.

But a few well chosen words (the ones you’re optimising your video for) will increase people’s chance of clicking and viewing your video rather than someone else’s.

Put in a good description including a link to your website.

YouTube automatically links any complete url in the description so you don’t have to.

This is useful to an extent but means that you can’t optimise the link for your preferred keywords.

YouTube can also automatically link to specific places in your video from the description – just put the minutes and seconds into the description like this: 1:27 (for 1 minute 27 seconds) and YouTube will take care of the rest.

Add in a few tags

Don’t overdo the tags.

I tend to use 3 or 4 for my videos – usually a few variations of the main keyword I’m targeting.

These end up in the meta keywords part of the page – which doesn’t really help anything – and may be used internally in YouTube, no-one knows for sure.

Add captions and annotations if you want to

YouTube will usually produce an automatic caption file which may or may not have much resemblance to what you said in the video. That’s where computer generated speech to text is at the moment.

If you have a script you used to create your video, upload that as a caption file and over-ride the automatic one.

If you don’t have a script, it’s your choice whether or not to type one out and upload it. Most of the time I don’t but that could just me being lazy.

Annotations are areas that you can put over some or all of your video.

If you have enough privileges, these can link to the website you have associated with your YouTube channel.

If you haven’t got to that stage yet, it’s worth aiming for it and spending a few minutes going through the process on YouTube.

Or you can link to other videos on YouTube if you prefer.

If you’d like to go into this process in more depth, check out my YouTube Video Recipe.