YouTube is a very crowded place that your video would have to be super special to get noticed. But unless people are searching for the keyword you used in your SEO, it would be hard for them to find your video and watch it. According to YouTube, there are over 100 hours of video content being uploaded to the platform every minute. Can you imagine the competition over there? But if you take the time to optimize your videos with SEO, they would have a better chance of getting noticed.

Use long video descriptions

It pains us to see video uploaders using short video description. Google can’t watch a video yet so they won’t know the content of the video unless you describe it below. The search engine relies heavily on the text surrounding your videos. The more YouTube knows about your videos, the more confidently it can rank your videos on Google. For good measure, make sure that the video description is at least 200 words.

Optimize around video keywords

What are video keywords? These are keywords that Google automatically associate with YouTube. Let’s take, for example, the phrase cute dogs. Google knows that when people search for cute dogs, they want videos of cute dogs and not articles about it. But when people search for information about migraine, they want to know about the symptoms and the treatment, so they are looking for medicine journals and articles. Before deciding on a keyword, you need to make sure that there are already video results of it on the first page of Google.

Get video views from online communities

If there’s one thing that YouTube loves above others it’s getting visits from online communities. These are fantastic places to funnel traffic from. But remember that online communities don’t take kindly to people just dropping links on their forums. When you see a question on Quora or Yahoo Answers that you think you have the answer to, provide some value text-wise first before suggesting that they watch your video about it.

Encourage subscribing and linking

YouTube uses user experience signals to know which videos are getting unique views and which are loved by their users. Encourage your viewers to like, subscribe, or link to your videos. That would be a good indicator to YouTube that you have a killer video on your hands. Put the call to action button—whether subscribe or link—at the end of your video.