12 Steps to YouTube Optimization

Updated March 4, 2025

Reading Time: 3 minutes

HD Quality Optimization

Creating high-quality video content is difficult. Coming up with an idea, scripting it and then filming it is a lot more involved than simply writing a blog post, or even creating a design like an infographic. However, if you do decide to make video content it can be a great addition to your website, giving users a much more interactive experience. But it’s worth nothing if nobody sees it. That’s where YouTube Optimization comes in.

So when you do go to the effort of creating videos for your business you need to make sure you’re getting as much out of them as you can. This is where optimization comes in. Just like the Google search engine results page, YouTube and other social networks are search engines. YouTube’s internal search functions in many of the same ways as the SERP, so find out how to get your video seen, by optimizing your video’s for YouTube.

You’re Holding the Remote Control

Getting your video to the top of the results page just means following some simple steps:

1. Put your keyword in the filename before you upload the video. YouTube reads this information.
2. Add between 6 and 8 meta tags. Less than 6 isn’t enough for YouTube to understand the context, while more than 8 is thought to be too many.
3. Use your 100 character title well. Make it descriptive, include the keyword/words and make it enticing.
4. Write a description for your video. You have 5,000 characters. Use them well. Treat this as a meta description for your video, like you would a blog post.
5. Add subtitles. This allows YouTube to ‘read’ your video and will drastically improve the ranking as well as helping out people who can’t listen to your audio.
6. Upload in HD if you can. The higher the quality the higher the ranking.
7. Add in video annotations if it suits your video’s style or you have other content to link to at the end of the video.
8. Choose an attractive, representative (not clickbaity) thumbnail.
9. Respond to any comments you get. This might not directly help your ranking, but it will help you build subscribers and make it more likely that people will interact with your content.
10. The density of views. This means “did a lot of people watch it in a small time period”. If your viewing figures are dense YouTube will push you to the top. To try and push this, make sure you are sharing your video on your other social platforms/ blog/ website at the same time to drive views.
11. Likes/ Dislikes and Views. These are ranking factors 101, but that doesn’t mean they should be ignored. If your last video got more dislikes than likes, there’s probably a reason why. The more likes and views you get, the higher you’ll rank.
12. Flags and Reports. Obviously, if your video is flagged or reported your ranking will suffer. Make sure you’re aware of YouTube’s content publishing guidelines if you think you might be creating some contentious content.

YouTube Optimization

Optimizing a video is much like optimizing a blog post. There isn’t any secret trick to doing it. All you need to do is to make sure you’re giving the search engine (in this case YouTube) as much information about the content of the video as you can, so it can choose to display it at the right time, to the right people.

Do you have any tips to get your YouTube video to the top of the table?