[Test] The SEO Power of Video: 7 Optimization Tips that Really Work

Beyond the popularity of video on the web and the importance of reaching the 18-34 viewers, there's an even better reason for adding video to your online marketing mix. Optimizing video in order to boost your creation on YouTube can do wonders for your site's page rank. Really. It works.

Google usually returns video results on the first page, so a ranking on YouTube for relevance on the search term can result in a far higher rank that would otherwise be attainable. Not only can you optimize video for Google and YouTube -- we'll give you some tips on this below -- if your content is pertinent and well-optimized it can give your website a higher rank on Google.

How YouTube ranks videos

1. YouTube looks at both the title and description of a video. The title can be up to 100 characters long, so make sure you work in the term you are optimizing for, as well as a good description of the video.
2. Remember to add target keywords as tags to your video.
3. You can use up to 5000 characters in your description. Make them count. This is an opportunity to go to town and construct lovingly elaborate text that is not only a keyword-rich description but is also a useful explanation of the video's content.
4. One of the video settings allows you to disable sharing, but you would have to be crazy to do that if you are interested in optimizing video content to attract new viewers.  Not only does each and every share put your content in front of dozens or even hundreds of fresh eyes, it also adds a backlink for your content, which will help Google to understand what other web pages consider your content important enough to link to it. This, as we know, increases the content's page rank.
5. Set your videos privacy settings to Public. You can also set your video to be private, but there is no reason why you would do that if you're trying to optimize video to attract more views.
6. Consider your distribution options. Allowing your video to be embedded in blogs and on social media can greatly increase the number of times your video is viewed, so make sure the 'embedding allowed' setting is enabled. Remember also to embed the video on your own website or blog.
7. Ratings and the number of views are factors but are far from the most important. Don't neglect them and make sure ratings and syndication are enabled.

This is just the beginning of the possibilities for optimizing video and what it can do for your website.