Thanks, Joanne. There are thousands of videos on …

Great demonstration. Clever use of the annotations feature, one strategy that gets over looked is optimizing the video itself before uploading it to YouTube. Most media file types allow for something called “metadata” so of like “meta tag” to a website but it pertains specifically to a file. With the metadata you can properly label the contents of the video with things like the file title, who created it, and with some software like VideoLAN which I use I can create my own metadata entry like “keywords”.

To do this with VideoLAN (VLC) simply construct your video, and begin to play it back in VLC. Press pause and then click on Tools > Media Information.

From there you'll be given a dialog box that will have entry fields that you can update:

Title
Artist (author)
Publisher
Copyright

Once you've filled out the information using keyword enriched verbiage that you are targeting, you can click on the Extra Metadata tab and there store more information (such as keywords, detailed descriptions, etc) if you would like. After the information has been entered to your liking, you will now need to re-save the video file to store the new information inside the file.

Once this long process is has been completed the video is now ready to be submitted to YouTube and other video sharing services of your choice, to shed on some light as to what this process does, YouTube is really a search engine, based a lot on the Google search algorithm that is commonly used to find website and content on the web. Some of the technology that is used within YouTube is that the service when it ranks and indexes videos is have the ability to probe the metadata.

Not many people realize that the metadata is taken into consideration (well, I guess now they/you do if you are reading this) and based on the information YouTube and other video services find within the metadata it helps the search feature better categorize the video properly for easy retrieval through it's search feature.

Now just like with Google you don't want to do things that misrepresent your website, you don't want to do employ any practice (or misuse) with the metadata because that could cause the video to a) not get indexed and b) could cause YouTube to want to scrutinize your account and that would be disastrous.

I've used this strategy and have gotten very favorable video views as well as ranking in both YouTube and Google search for selected keyword terms.

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Wow, this is a terrific tip! It is quick and easy; but most people would overlook this opportunity to utilize dated YouTube videos. Thanks for sharing.

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