When the term SEO is mentioned, it primarily conjures up images of Google, and perhaps Bing, Yahoo or Baidu. One oft neglected platform that is frequently left out of consideration is YouTube.

For those who monitor Alexa’s global traffic rankings, they will see that YouTube, is in fact, number 2 on the list of visited sites…in the entire world. This makes it one of the largest search engines, that most have simply not optimized their content for.

With a staggering 4 billion hours per month viewed on YouTube, accessing its’ potential can allow you to reach millions of viewers on a given day. With a properly managed YouTube channel, you can create a new avenue for your promotional videos and products, in turn elevating your own online presence.

Since it is hard for your actual video content to be analysed, it is imperative that your use all available options to ensure your videos are promoted correctly.

To maximise exposure, you should focus on the video title, description, tags and thumbnails.

It is suggested that the video title contain at least 5 words and be anywhere around the 70 characters mark. Using memorable phrases, and popular words can help you reach your targeted audience. In addition to this, episode numbers and branding should be added at the end but be careful that your title is not cut off on different platforms, such as mobile.

YouTube affords a huge 5,000 characters limit for video descriptions, but your own video information should ideally get the keywords and title in quickly, and not exceed around 350 words, as that has been deemed an ideal amount. A focused description can yield results not only in YouTube’s search engine, but also in Google. By including a link to your homepage, you can also drive extra traffic to your own website, thus increasing your brand awareness.

Video Tags are simply just keywords that you add to your video, that inform YouTube, and those who are searching, what kind of content and related information, can be found in your videos. This adds another opportunity to align your videos target audience with that of your product or services.