Why Can't I Search My You Tube Video?
To get a better understanding of how this works, put yourself in You Tube's shoes for a minute. Here you have a gazillion videos being uploaded to your site everyday and you what to put each video in its place. Now, take into consideration there are zillions of spammers and crooks who would love nothing more than to have their videos all over You Tube. So you can rest assured You Tube is going to "ease" your video into the mix and not just plaster it all over the place. You Tube employees do not monitor each video upload. They depend on the You Tube community to let them know what the video is about. For instance, if your video is titled, "My Hunting Trip" and it is actually a race car video, people are going to click off of your video within the first 10 seconds. This lets You Tube know the video is poorly titled or is not worthy of top spots on search results and related video listings. In the web site world, they call it a bounce rate. If people go to your site from Google search results and leave without looking at your pages, Google picks up on this and will not rank your site high on search results. For this reason, it is very important to have good quality content, whether you are making a video or building a web site. This is why the popular video makers try and keep their videos under 3 minutes.
Now that you have a video that you are confident is the best you can do, it is time to look in to the tags, title, and description side of things. Use the Google Keyword Tool to find a search term to focus on first. What would someone type in that is relevant to your video? If your video is about skydiving you may want to focus on a key phrase like, awesome skydiving videos. A long, unique, and specific phrase is easier it is to get on top of search results than say just the word skydiving would be. The keyword tool from Google will show you how many people typed in a specific term last month to help you get an idea of a particular phrase's popularity. The key is finding the balance between popular search terms and competition levels of the target key phrase. Also, you want to start with one phrase at a time. Get on top of a search result for on key phrase and then add another and so on.
If you were going to use the key phrase awesome skydiving videos as your target phrase, enter it in your tags as a phrase by putting double quotes around it to specify to You Tube that you want to be found by that phrase and not each individual word of that group of words. "Awesome skydiving videos" is a key phrase and would show up in search results for those who search it. If you just put the three words in your tags without the double quotes, you will be in three different search results for all three words. Three search results are not better than one if it is highly competitive and you are on page 231 of the results.
In addition to tags, use your chosen phrase in the title and description. I have found it best to add a word to your phrase in the title and use the phrase in the second and last sentence of your description. The description needs to be at least 10 complete sentences long composed to inform your viewers who read it. The longer your description is the more You Tube has to go on to decide what your video is about. Remember, an algorithm can not watch videos. It is just a secret math formula that is constantly evolving to make the You Tube experience better for the user.
As long as people watch your video all the way through, click the like button more than dislike, you will start showing up higher and higher on search results. Once this happens, add a phrase or word to your tags and description but leave the title as it is and you will start the climb on another search results list. The process generally takes a week or two for You Tube to show it for the phrase you choose and tally up the user reactions who searched it to move it up the list.
Having back links on Squidoo, eBay, Digg, and StumbleUpon will help You Tube learn more about your videos as well. When doing so, Google will get the user reactions from these sites also and let You Tube know. It is no longer effective to just have back links if no one is using them. So it is now important to be active on these sites to ensure user reactions. However, Yahoo still just counts the links and notes it as a back link. Google want s to see people using them before it is counted. To learn more about back links study the How To Get on Google Search Results tutorial.
