Some Quick YouTube Optimization Tips

I Love YouTube by Álvaro Ibáñez
Photo credit - I Love YouTube by Álvaro Ibáñez

Here are just a few things you can do to improve your YouTube channel that may not have occurred to you.


These aren't huge changes, but they do make things better for your band's YouTube channel. It's just making a few changes to how you post to your video channel.

Optimize the video title.

The actual length of your video’s title can help your click through rate.

What most people don't know is, on YouTube you get 100 characters you can use for your video title. But you don't want to necessarily use all of them.

Here's what happens when people search for videos on YouTube. YouTube's best practice guidelines even tell you that, you should try and keep it less than 70 characters, anything over 70 will get cut off in the search results.

Seems the best title is to hit somewhere between 40-70 characters.

The video description box.

Lots of people only use the description box to give a brief outline on what the video is about. Maybe a link to your website. If even that sometimes.

There are many missed opportunities if that's all you do. Think of it this way. People may have landed on your video from a link or a suggestion. They know nothing about you but what's in the video they are watching. If you send them to a link that isn't directly related to the video they may lose interest.

If it's a music video, link to all the places they can get it or listen to it in the description. Spotify, Amazon, iTunes, Bandcamp, your albums page on your site… all of these if you have them.

You don't know what this new person's listening preferences are, so have all of these choices in the description for them.

Another thing to think about, the content of the description box is indexed by Google, so whatever you put there can help with getting a jump up the rankings.

Add lyrics at the end of the video description too. People search for lyrics to songs all the time. This will help the lyrics and the video show up in the search for whatever song it is for.

More information can help keep people on your video page. Many people will start watching a video, then after a while they’ll start looking at the other areas of the screen while still listening to the video.

If your description box is just a single line description, then they’ll naturally look elsewhere on the page, which is a problem - because on the page are other videos for them to click on, which takes them away from your video.

So, having some decent content in the description box keeps them on your page, as the video plays in the background.


Download this YouTube checklist pdf free!
>>Click to get the pdf 


Get A Custom YouTube Channel URL

OK, here is the one, more technically advanced, thing you can do. It will involve having some access to your web page information.

This will make it easy for people to find you and your YouTube channel.

You've got your domain name, your Facebook page name, you should also have your YouTube channel name.

By default when you make a YouTube channel for your band, you are automatically given a random URL with various letters and numbers like this:

example: youtube.com/channel/DGRpNCeoay5Q

This isn’t really easy to show or tell people about.

But you can create one that has your band name in the URL like:

example: https://youtube.com/c/lorenzosmusic

It's fairly easy to set up. If you have Google analytics on your site, that is.

Starting with the technical part.

You just need to verify your site in the Google Search Console (formerly called Google Webmaster Tools).

If you already have Google Analytics on your website it’s just one click inside of the Google Search Console to verify your site.

Here’s the instructions from Google help docs to get your site verified on the Google Search Console: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35179?hl=en

Changing the channel URL

After you verified your site, you can get your url set up on your YouTube channel.

Here are the steps.

1) On YouTube, click on your logo/icon in the top right, then click on the ‘Creator Studio’ button.

2) In the ‘Creator Studio’ on the left sidebar select the ‘Advanced’ option under the ‘Channel’ menu.

3) In the main window enter in the URL of your website and click on the ‘Add’ button.

Since you already verified your account with Google you should get an instant ‘Success’ green light!

4) Click on your icon at the top right again and select the ‘Settings’ icon, which is a little cog image.

5) In the settings ‘Overview’ screen click on the link to the right of your profle picture that says ‘Advanced’.

6) In the advanced settings screen you’ll see that you now have a custom URL for your channel.

And that’s it!

Bonus

Now here's a trick that no one tells you.

That /c/ that is in your URL, you can skip that!

It will redirect to the channel if you just put your channel name after the YouTube URL.

So the link example I gave before it also works if you just use this:
example: https://youtube.com/lorenzosmusic

Which is even nicer.

Hope this helped and feel free to leave a comment below!

Download this YouTube checklist pdf free!
>>Click to get the pdf 



via - Dan Raine Report (pdf link)

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