Now that you have you videos uploaded and publicly available there are a few more things you can do to help the search engines find and understand exactly what your video is all about.
Advanced Tagging
The first, and easiest thing is to go back through your videos and edit the tags section of each one.
From the earlier steps outlined in this series you should have added two or three tags to your videos to let users and the search engines understand the subject matter of your video.
YouTube uses these tags to not only understand what your video is about but also to determine what other videos are similar to yours.
Take a look at the image.
When a user searches for a type of video on YouTube a list of videos is presented. The earlier parts of this series cover how these results come about and how you can feature in them.
However when the user clicks on one of those videos and plays it a screen similar to the one shown above appears.
Notice Arrow 1. This is a list of videos YouTube believes to be similar to the one the user clicked on. YouTube is attempting to extend the users choice in case the video they clicked on is not exactly what they wanted.
Now look at Arrow 2. After the chosen video is played YouTube then presents on the screen another set of choices for similar videos.
Remember YouTube wants the user to stay and view videos for as long as possible so they will keep presenting what they think are closely related videos to the users original search term.
The question is, “How do they arrive at these choices?”
Answering that question is more the subject of a PhD thesis in advanced mathematics than a few posts on YouTube tips but what we do know is that at least one controllable (by you) factor plays a major role.
That factor is the tags you associate with your video and this is how you can tell YouTube that your videos are related to each other.
What you need to do is decide on one unique tag to add to all of your videos. The tag can be pretty much anything but it has to be unique.
Let me show you an example. In the first part of this series we were dealing with a fictional YouTube Channel dealing with Wind Power that had a number of videos on it covering the subject of wind power for the home.
Of course we tagged all the uploaded videos with things like “wind power,” “wind energy” and maybe “home wind power.”
Those tags give a clear indication of the contents of not only the video but the Channel as well because they will be appearing on the Channel’s main page.
The problem is that YouTube has over 134,000 videos tagged with “wind power!” So even if you get into the results with one video it is unlikely that you will appear anywhere else.
You can tell YouTube that you have other videos on the subject or closely related videos by entering a unique tag that will only appear on YOUR videos.
So in this example if we had named the Wind Power Channel “Joe’s Wind Power” then all you would have to do is enter “Joe’s Wind Power” as a tag to every video in the account.
Now YouTube (and other search engines for that matter) know that there is a connection between all of your videos that no other videos have.
This greatly increases your chances of appearing in the related videos column (1 above) and on the “Next video” section (2 above) of the page as shown in the image.
Closed Captions
The second step is to take advantage of the Closed Captions feature in YouTube provided the video your are dealing with has a narrative (spoken word) track of some kind.
Navigate to the Video Manager section of your YouTube account and select the Edit Button on the first video.
At the top of the screen you will now see a “Captions” tab.
Click that Tab and you should see a screen looking something like this:
Arrow 1. If this entry – Machine Transcript – is present then the speech recognition software within YouTube has “listened” to the audio track and has created a captions file. This is simply a timed transcript of what is being said on the audio track.
Most often this transcript will be unreadable and make no sense at all!
Arrow 2. Shows thew captions file that the video is actually using.
The problem for the voice recognition software is the huge differences present in both audio quality and spoken accents present in the the videos they attempt to transcribe.
To make use of this feature effectively you will need a transcript of your video in a text (.txt) file prepared in a certain way.
You can either transcribe the video yourself or get it done by a cheap online service.
Generally the transcription will look something like this:
“Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry’s standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book.
It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged.
It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum.”
This text needs to be changed so that it looks like this:
“Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry’s standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum.”
Notice all the paragraphs and line breaks have been removed.
Save this text file giving it a name suggestive of the contents. E.g. “mainkeyword.txt.”
Navigate back to the Captions section of the Video Manager for your YouTube account and click the button marked “Upload Caption File or Transcript.” Arrow 3 in the image above.
Select the text file you created and click Open and you will be presented with two choices. Choose “Transcript file,” the correct language and give it a name similar to the name of the video.
Click “Upload and let it run.
After uploading wait about 15 to 20 minutes and the newly uploaded file will now appear as a choice for the Captions on the video. Select it and you are done but also just check to see your video preferences show Captions are to be available for users to see.
What happened while you were waiting was that the voice recognition software from YouTube re-analyzed the audio track with reference to your uploaded transcript and created a perfect captions file for the video.
The true value of this is that now search engines can accurately work out what your video is about and position it correctly in search results.
Part One – Introduction
Part Two – Referrals and Quality
Part Three – Optimizing Your Videos
Part Four – Video Optimization Checklist
Part Five – Optimizing Your YouTube Channel
Part Six – Advanced YouTube Techniques
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