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What is up people?
It's currently Thursday the 3rd January and true to form over here in the UK, it's currently
lashing it down with rain and it's chuffing cold to boot!
Now, before I get into the topic at hand, which is "how to get more views on your YouTube
videos" I just want to touch upon the gameplay in the background: it's obviously Black Ops
2, playing some CTF on Slums and it was recorded during launch week. Which means the only thing
I know is that I was playing the objective. This video has been in my bookmarks for a
while so I'm hoping it is fairly entertaining to watch.
Now, let's get down to business.
Some of you might know this already but most of you won't: in the real world I'm actually
paid to teach people the art - and it's definitely an art and not a science - of search engine
optimisation. Which means it's up to me to show them how to get their website to the
top of Google.
In a nutshell, search engine optimisation is about three things. The subject is often
shrouded in mystery but really it's quite simple.
First of all, you have your on site SEO, which is everything you can see on a website plus
something called the "meta description".
Second you have your off-site SEO, which is any reference to your website elsewhere on
the internet, whether it's a forum, a blog, a directory, whatever else - that is all considered
off-site SEO.
Third, and finally, you have your code and, in short, clean code is good code. If a website
loads quickly then it's much better in terms of search engine optimisation than one that
takes forever and a day.
Now, I might come back to these at a later date if the video goes well, but for now I
just want to draw parralels between those three things and YouTube which is, believe
it or not, the second biggest search engine.
Between Google and YouTube they have 98.5 per cent of the search market on a daily basis,
so they pretty much dominate.
And in particular, I want to talk about on-site SEO from a YouTube perspective. Now, this
covers: the title, the description, the video tags, the thumbnail and the video itself.
And, without doubt, the biggest mistake people make when they are uploading their video is
to not use the description feature as well as they could.
So, here's the tip. Here is the top tip from this video: when you are uploading a YouTube
video you optimise the first two to three sentences of your video's description.
And when I say optmise I mean make it a really concise summary of what your video is all
about. Now that is not to say spam keywords, you need to make this thing read well. And
here is why.
When you put your video description into YouTube, Google will take the first 160 characters
as the meta description. Now this is what Google uses to determine, along with the video
title and tags admittedly, what your video is all about.
So if you have for example two identical videos with the same title and same tags, if one
video starts with a concise description and one starts with links to social media and
a t-shirt website for example, then the one with the concise description will out perform
the other one.
Now, the second reason is the first 120 characters are shown next to your video in any given
YouTube search. And if you have a well written description - one that reads well - that will
potentially encourage someone to click on your video as opposed to one that might appear
above it in the YouTube search results.
Now, as I said before, YouTube and Google search engine optimisation is an art: it's
not a science, so there's no right or wrong way. But I can - almost - guarantee you that
by tweaking your meta descriptions you will see an increase in views.
And the reason that I say "almost" is that any SEO or anyone that is involved in SEO
that says they can guarantee results - they are lying. There is never any guarantee in
search engine optmisation. I can tell you that, right now.
However, to try and prove the point that what I'm talking about really works, I am going
to upload this video twice. Once to this channel, my gaming channel, and once elsewhere on a
personal channel that I have. And in a month's time I will compare the amount of hits that
both videos get from search only. And the main difference between the two - I'm going
to use the same video footage, the same title, the same tags - is that in the video on my
gaming channel I will use a concise description where as in the one on the other channel I
will open up with links to my social media profiles.
So, hopefully you guys enjoyed this video. If you like it, I'm happy to go into all sorts
of other stuff on search engine optimisation. If anyone is thinking about starting a business
this stuff is really important because it helps you get out there.
Anyway, I might come back to that at a later date. In any event, I will see you in around
about a month to see the results of this test.
Later.