2. YouTube Lessons from TED
Who is TED?
TED is the latest creation from
Family Guy mastermind Seth
Macfarlane.
But this isn't a slide deck about how
funny he is, although he IS hilarious!
3. YouTube Lessons from TED
Why TED?
I've been interested in the film since I first saw the trailer and
I've also been intrigued as to the marketing in the build up to
the films release.
I’ve been following this channel:
http://www.youtube.com/TedIsReal
4. YouTube Lessons from TED
YouTube optimisation
TED epitomises the type of content that I like to see on YouTube and
undoubtedly what many of the other 800 million YouTube users want to
see.
First of all the content is amusing. Take a look through the YouTube
keyword tool and you'll see that virtually all the search volumes are
dominated by videos with a focus on entertaining. You'll also notice that
keywords where perhaps there is a lot of search volume in adwords is
almost non existent for YouTube.
Businesses take note: that long sought after viral video isn't going to be
achieved by merely creating something that you feel is funny. Do your
research and find out if it is worthwhile investing in the video to reach
your target audience. Is the audience commercially relevant?
5. YouTube Lessons from TED
YouTube titles
Titles on YouTube are the equivalent of title tags for a webpage.
Your video title should be descriptive and as natural as possible but should also
include key terms that people will look for. To find a rough idea of what people are
searching for use the YouTube Keyword Tool.
6. YouTube Lessons from TED
YouTube titles
The image below shows that the main things searched for are the trailers and the
thunder buddy song, so TED should be clearly labelling these on his
channel, because that’s what people are searching for.
7. YouTube Lessons from TED
YouTube titles
You’ll notice that Ted’s video doesn’t make the optimum use of the keyword tool, it’s
effectively missing out on 60,600 searches by not using “ted official trailer” within it’s
video title.
8. YouTube Lessons from TED
YouTube descriptions
Similar to titles, descriptions on YouTube help
algorithms understand the relevance of your
video.
Optimising your titles and descriptions means
your video will stand more chance of
appearing for related searches.
It’s best practice to add a link to the most
relevant page on your website (highlighted in
red here) as well as a detailed paragraph
about what the content is. The description is
another place to include your relevant
keywords.
9. YouTube Lessons from TED
TED could do better…
Notice that the videos don’t make use of the tags feature
of YouTube:
Tags are a good way of including keywords that perhaps
couldn’t fit in your title, but are related to your content.
Examples for Ted could be ‘Seth Macfarlane’, ‘Mark
Wahlberg’, ‘Mila Kunis’ or ‘Family Guy’.
10. YouTube Lessons from TED
YouTube playlists
Playlists are great on YouTube, they are
really useful for grouping your content
together and making it easy for people to
view your clips, trailers or promo vids.
Playlists appear in search listings on
YouTube too and can be optimised in a
similar way to individual videos, playlists
will also show up in regular Google
search results.
11. YouTube Lessons from TED
YouTube playlists
Grouping videos together is a
better way of aggregating traffic
between your content, the number
of views is a major ranking factor
on YouTube so enhancing
interlinking your content via
playlists should help to increase
the visibility and therefore views of
all your video content.
When watching a video from a
playlist, other videos from the
same playlist should appear in the
related videos column:
12. YouTube Lessons from TED
Further reading
Kiss Metrics - http://blog.kissmetrics.com/youtube-channel-optimization/
Search Engine Watch - http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2064431/YouTube-
Keyword-Tool-and-Video-Optimization-Techniques
Read the post version of these slides:
http://mikejeffs.co.uk/2012/07/31/things-to-learn-from-ted-about-youtube-optimisation/
