You may or may not know, but YouTube is only 4 years old.  With the super fast ‘give it to me now’ world we live in we sometimes forget that sites like YouTube and Facebook are in their early stages, paving the road where there has been no road.

Let’s face it, if you have not heard of YouTube it’s either because you have been living in the subway sewers for the past four years or you have never been exposed to the interest.  Point blank, odds are that you know exactly what YouTube is; a video sharing community.

Sure, you have watched video’s and probably submitted some of your own.  For most people that watch and share their own videos, YouTube is fun, exciting, creative, entertaining, captivating, and motivating and so much more.  But what if your goal is to upload a video on YouTube and have it go viral? It’s a whole different world when it comes to optimizing YouTube video for viral and search.

The other day I had the opportunity to hear Greg Jarboe, author of Marketing an Hour a Day speak at the SES Chicago Expo 2009.  Normally, the session intervals have 3 or 4 guest speakers that last roughly a little over an hour.  The nice part about Greg’s session was that he had the audience all to himself for that hour plus.

Greg Jarboe Speaking at SES Chicago Expo 2009

Greg’s presentation was focused on YouTube optimization, basically optimizing your YouTube video for its highest search ranking potential on YouTube as well as traditional search engines.  Although he covered much of his book in the hour plus at SES, he did not cover everything contained in his book.

The good part is that what he did talk about the most critical elements in optimizing your YouTube video.  With this being said, all of the below stats, data, tips and tricks are courtesy of Greg Jarboe as discussed during his presentation at SES Chicago Expo 2009.

Just to shed some quick data on the power and usability of YouTube, realize this:
-    People watch more YouTube videos than they perform Google searches.
-    YouTube has a 57% reach on the 18 to 34 year old age group (FYI, that’s 36.9 million users alone).

Just taking these two usability factors into consideration, why wouldn’t you fully optimize your YouTube video to perform at its highest potential?

As Greg Jarboe said “YouTube is the biggest and most underleveraged marketing channel” today.

With this being said, let’s move into what Greg mentions are the three most important factors to consider strategizing your YouTube marketing efforts:

1 – Discovery: Will/Can your video be found?  Is it fully optimized for YouTube and SERP search?
2 – Watch:  Is your video worth watching or is it junk?  Does your video add value to the viewer?
3 – Share: Is your video worth sharing?  Why would someone want to embed your video on their site? (this is how videos on YouTube go viral)

To put a little more emphasis on the ‘share’ aspect, I believe it’s important to understand how people discover your video which self explains why embedding of videos is so important for your YouTube success.

-    45% will discover your video on a video site such as YouTube
-    44% will discover your video by a site owner embedded your video into their blog
-    6% will discover your video through traditional search engine results pages
-    2% will discover your video through social bookmarking
-    -1% will discover your video on a niche video search engine

Technically, YouTube is a search engine.  However its search is very basic and limited and primarily concentrates on ‘text-matching’.  Optimizing your video on YouTube is almost like old-school SEO.  Let’s break down the most important factors that the YouTube search engine algorithm takes into consideration.

1 - Text-matching: when a user queries a phrase can that phrase be found in your video title or description?
2 – Tags: Just like blogs, can the words you choose for the video tags be found in the users broad keyword query?
3 – Relevancy – Is the users broad keyword query relevant to your videos title, description and tags in general?
4 - Number of hits/views (popularity)
5 - Ratings (good ratings get ranked higher)

What are the three most important text-matching elements when optimizing your YouTube video?
1 – Title – did you do your research? Do you have your keywords within your title tag?
2 – Description – utilize all characters available, most people don’t.  Do you have your keywords within your description?
3 – Tags – smoke em’ if ya’ got em’, use any all relevant keywords and phrases as possible.

Once you have properly optimized your YouTube video what can you do to boost the video views without any fancy 3rd party automation or stealthy ‘leaked’ info from self proclaimed video gurus?
1 – Use links in the video description – cross promotion on/to your channel or your website
2 – Create video responses – point users to your next video with video responses
3 – Use Annotations – link to other similar video(s) of yours
4 – Use Captions – add subtitles to your video and reach a broader audience
5 - Embedding – encourage others to embed your videos so it can be shared and go viral

Finally, what kind of video will you create?  Well, rather than guessing here are ten proven approaches in creating your video that have worked for years and more importantly work on YouTube:
1 - Humor
2 - Slice of life
3 - Testimonials
4 - Demonstrations
5 - Problem solving
6 - Talking heads
7 - Characters
8 - Reasons why
9 - News
10 - Emotion

YouTube can be a massive asset to your online marketing strategy if performed and optimized properly to maximize its potential in order to get those million plus views…  With a little elbow grease and following these simple tips and tricks, your YouTube video can go viral.  In the words of Greg Jarboe: “Video MUST go viral to be successful.  People must SHARE your video”.

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