The use of YouTube has exploded in the last year. It is now the world’s second largest search engine, the third most visited website (after Facebook and Google) and over 3 billion videos are watched on the site each day. These are some serious numbers and the massive potential of Youtube marketing is attracting more and more marketing professionals who want to use the site to target, engage and grow their online audience.

Video SEO for YouTube is actually very similar to traditional SEO. Since the majority of video thumbnails displayed in Google’s search results are in fact YouTube hosted videos, the basics of optimizing your Youtube Video aren't very difficult to learn. Where Video SEO gets more complicated is when you want to position videos hosted on your website and have Google index the metadata on your servers so that people will be sent directly to your website.

Since the page architecture for YouTube is already set in stone, you have more limited options than in traditional SEO. However, the factors for ranking that are within your control (title, description, tags, and annotations) can be optimized with your keywords to ensure your video comes up near the top of the YouTube search rankings.

The exact algorithm used by YouTube is a closely guarded secret. These YouTube ranking factors are based on my testing and experience.

Search Ranking Factors For YouTube's Search

1. Keyword Placement

Keyword research provides the foundation of a strong ranking on YouTube. Video SEO produces the best results for long tail keywords so spending the time to carefully research a keyword with decent search volume and low video competition is crucial. To see estimated search volumes and keyword competition, use the Youtube Keyword Tool.

Once you know which keywords you want to target, you need to strategically place them on your video's YouTube page. Since the site architecture of YouTube is fixed, the 3 places you can insert your keywords are:

Title: This is the most crucial place to have your keywords. Keep in mind that a catchy headline is vital for social sharing and for clicks on the YouTube search results so avoid the temptation to stuff too many keywords in the title.

Description: Most people only leave a short one or two sentence description but I recommend that you include at least 2 or 3 paragraphs explaining the content of your video. Include your chosen keyword at least 2-3 times in the text.

Tags: Use your keywords in tags along with contextually similar groupings of words. Keep it under 10 tags.

2. User Engagement

This is where things get a little tricky. YouTube wants to show the most engaging videos in its search results. With between 10,000-60,000 videos being uploaded each day, an average video isn't good enough. If the content of your video isn't exceptional, then it's an uphill battle to get a good ranking on Youtube for any competitive keyword.

Keep in mind that when you upload a new video to YouTube, you have a 48 hour window to heavily promote your video if you want to push it in front of a massive audience through Youtube's Homepage and Trending Videos. It usually takes about 50,000 views in this short timeframe to hit the homepage and earn a spot in the trending videos. To maximize the audience reach of your YouTube video for a marketing campaign, I recommend you hire someone to promote your video for you and it will give your video SEO efforts a major boost.

That being said, these are the measures of user engagement and interaction that factor into the ranking of your YouTube video:

Views: The number of views and also the frequency of views.

Likes: The number of likes and the ratio between likes and dislikes.

Comments: The total number of comments. Try to answer audience comments to increase your engagement.

Favourites: How many YouTube users have added the video to their favourites or a playlist. This is likely the most important measure of a video's influence.

Video Age: The age of the video. Older videos that don't have high engagement and views will get buried.

3. Influence

The influence part of YouTube’s algorithm looks at the trust and authority of the user account that uploaded the video. This is the primary way that YouTube assesses the trustworthiness of the video and filters out the 1000s of low-quality spam videos that are uploaded to the site every day.

Membership Age: This looks at the length of time the user has been a member of YouTube.

Subscribers: The number of subscribers to the user's YouTube Channel.

Total Channel Views: The total number of viewers that have visited the user's YouTube Channel.

Embeds: The number of times the video has been embedded on a third-party website. Think of embeds and favourites as the YouTube equivalent of incoming links on the web.

Inbound Links: The number of inbound links to the video.

Sharing: People sharing the video on social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Following these video SEO guidelines and spending the time on the keyword research to identify the right keyword combination will greatly increase your chances of success with YouTube marketing. To track your progress, I recommend keeping a close eye on the excellent video analytics provided by Youtube Insights.